Why I Hate ATL

AirTran's Fantasy Hub!

Then the preacher said "Son, even if you're destined for heaven, you'll still connect through Atlanta!"

Over the past 24 hours I have had to bail out a staff member who was booked to travel from Reagan Airport (DCA) back to Phoenix (PHX). He had his ticket on AirTran's flight connecting through Atlanta (ATL).

The whole thing would have been chalked up to traveling on Friday the 13th, except the same thing happened to me on AirTran last month from Washington Dulles (IAD) to PHX through ATL. 

My flight was weather delayed in Dulles for 25 minutes, so my connection in ATL to PHX was lost. 

Once in ATL AirTran told me their am flight is oversold, and they would fly me home at the end of next day.

I checked into my hotel. 

Adding up the extra's I ultimately paid to get a cheap fare on AirTran: A day lost at work, a night at the Westin, an extra breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I returned on the same flight I would have been on the night before.

Once on board the plane to PHX, the flight attendants told us all to scrunch up cause "every seat was sold". Yet, when we took off (on time) the plane was at least 20% empty. For those keeping track that spells 20% of the passengers misconnected. In other words, we had a repeat performance of what happened the night before. The staff confided in me that for much of the year it happens every night.

Fast forward to yesterday. 

My staffer calls me "AirTran is gonna be 3 hours late taking off from DCA due to bad weather in ATL. They tell me I will surely miss my flight from ATL to PHX. They will not re-book me on anyone else" (despite the dozens of PHX flights available on various carriers.....). 

He was then told (with a straight face) that the earliest flight they would assure him a seat from ATL to PHX would be three days (I am not making this up!) later. So he'd have to bear the cost for three days of hotel and food in ATL. So much for the cheap airfare!

I told him to call their bluff and demand a refund on his non-refundable fare.  

He did.

We then booked him a four star room in DC on Hotwire for $99 (he said he "felt like a rockstar") and flew him home on Frontier the next day for about $80 more. Yeah, he lost a day thanks to AirTran's Fantasy Hub in Atlanta, but got a free day to tour the Smithsonian.

What have we learned?

AirTran may be fine for cheap North / South Atlantic service. But, no matter how cheap it seems, DO NOT fly AirTran East / West if your plane connects in ATL (which it will.)

Telling a passenger that they fully intend to strand you at your own cost in ATL for three days, is the equivalent of sitting for hours on the tarmac, except you have no recourse.

I fly almost every week. I fly through some of the busiest and most weather impacted airports in America. But without fail the worst problems I encounter usually have ATL somewhere in the itinerary. 

And that is why I hate ATL.

Roadboy's Travels © 2010

The Park City Waldorf Astoria

The Sweet Life in Park City

To me the concept of branding the name "Waldorf Astoria" just seems odd. Here in Arizona The Arizona Biltmore will always be The Arizona Biltmore and in Rome The Cavalieri will always be The Cavalieri.

I do not understand the desire / need to try to add more cachet to these luxe properties via branding them as "Waldorf Astoria this" or "Waldorf Astoria that". I sort of find it hard (and pretentious) to say the "Waldorf Astoria Arizona Biltmore".

But, despite what I might think, branding is now a fact of life. And the gaggle of private equity geeks running around these days buying everything in sight know it is costly and time consuming to create prestige brand names like "Ritz Carlton", "Four Seasons" or "Conrad" from scratch. Conversely, it is cheap to simply buy provenance.

In order to jump start the new Waldorf Astoria (WA) line of hotels, Hilton began by acquiring and re-branding a carefully assembled selection of ultra-prestige and much loved properties.

The process has been successful and Hilton now has a critical mass of celebrated properties carrying the "Waldorf Astoria" name. Now, instead of merely buying and/or re-branding existing properties, Hilton has begun developing new properties in high-end destinations (where suitable prestige properties are not available to buy and re-brand).

One of the first of the "from scratch" WA properties is the new Waldorf Astoria Park City.

I got to enjoy a stay there last week.

Although all of logo's and paperwork at the hotel lists its official title as The Dakota, once you are away from the property itself, you will only see it referenced to as Waldorf Astoria Park City.

At first I was a bit surprised that the hotel was not located in posh Deer Valley and was instead sited in The Canyons resort. In retrospect I think this was a very good choice. The WA is next to the ritzy Miner's Club and a new tram. So, although it lacks the ski-in / ski-out feature of Deer Valley's new St. Regis, this location allows you to simply walk across the street and be whisked to mid-mountain.

The Canyon's location is easy for guests to find. It is a far more family friendly hill since kids can snowboard here, but not at stodgy old Deer Valley. Finally, this location will soon feature direct access to a brand new golf course.

Across the Street - A New Tramway That Whisks Skiers Direct to Mid-Mountain

It offers a Golden Door spa, great pool area, a beautiful restaurant, and a great fitness area.

 Standard Cliche "Mountain Chic" Architecture 

The uber-cliched "Mountain Lodge" architecture of the hotel is so overdone everywhere in Park City it now provokes a gag reflex in me and the furniture choices in the hotel can only be described as gold dust epoch meets kitsch.

Note to WA, try to restrain your electrical engineer. Every room (including each bathroom) had no fewer than five light switches! In an era of sustainability do we really need such excess?

That said, the rooms are amazing. Many offer the equivalent features of a full condo. My room for example had two full bathrooms, two fireplaces, a full size washer dryer, and a spacious kitchen outfitted with full-sized Viking appliances.

I was ready to move in!

The Living Area

The Kitchen

The Bedroom

The Ultimate Family Luxury 

A Full Sized in-Room Washer Dryer!

Roadboy wishes he could have spent about three days here (with his mountain bike, a good pair of walking shoes, a couple of books, and a swim suit!)

They still have to get some bugs out (service in The Spruce restaurant was slow, the coffee cold, and the prices high). But those are just birthing pains.

The rates in the summer were wonderfully low. Even with the silly "Resort" fee tacked on, my daily rate was only about $175/nt. However, when the snow flies, prepare to listen to your wallet scream. The posted rates for this very same room in January start at an almost completely unbelievable $825/nt!

Between the new St. Regis and the New Waldorf Astoria, my beloved Stein Erickson Lodge has taken a quick one-two punch. 

Roadboy's Travels © 2010   

A Beautiful Ant Hill

The Most Visited Place in Washington DC

What is the most visited site in Washington DC? The White House? Washington Monument? The Smithsonian Museums? The Capital mall?

Nope. 34,000,000 visitors a year pass through Washington's venerable Beaux-Arts Union Station.  

Designed by Chicago Architect Daniel Burnham and completed just 4 years before his death, this building still draws gasps of admiration from anyone seeing it for the first time. 

Burnham is the architect who designed many of America's first skyscraper's and led the design team for the most influential World's Fair in history; the neoclassical 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He designed New York's iconic Flatiron building and created the famous Chicago Plan to guide rebuilding the city after the great fire. He also created the master plans for Manilla and San Francisco. 

Thanks to rejections from both Harvard and Yale, he learned architecture the old fashioned way, by apprenticeship. He then went on to become one of the most influential architects America has ever produced.

Union Station was completed at a cost of $125,000,000 (which would convert to about $3 billion dollars today). Its site originally covered 200 acres of former swamp land. 

When completed the white marble edifice initiated the style that would soon be emulated in the Supreme Courts building and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials.  

70 Pounds of Gold Leaf Adorn the Dome 

The reason it works so well today is because it is still doing what it was intended to do. Serve as a train station. It allows for the smooth transfer from DC's Metro subway system to either AMTRAK or MARC trains. From here passengers can efficiently travel downtown to downtown on an ACELA high speed train from DC to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. I particularly like the service to the Baltimore BWI airport.  

Designed in An Era When Architects 

Still Integrating Art in Architecture

Another key to the success of Union Station is its integration of superb shops and creative restaurants. This is the ultimate place to people watch and eat well.

The Lower Level Food Court

Always busy, Union Station is a superb gateway to the America's national treasure; Washington DC. This is not a place to "visit". It is a place to "use".

Roadboy's Travels © 2010

A Dream Come True?

The New 787

I noticed a little piece on Yahoo today that made my head start spinning. The new Boeing Dreamliner has made its maiden flight outside the United States landing in Farnborough England for the Farnborough Airshow.

I hope I am not just succumbing to hype. And I do not mean to minimize the achievements that Boeing and Airbus engineers have made on their respective new aircraft in the past two decades. But after seeing some renderings of the cabin and carefully examining some of the scale models of this plane, the 787 appears to be a true departure from the last generation of commercial aircraft, and this road warrior welcomes it.

Carbon Composites Allow For A Highly Sculpted Silhouette

It is not as big as the new Airbus A380, so it won't take so long to load and unload. Nor does it require most major airports to extend their runways. It has a smooth sculpted swept back almost dolphin-like look to its fuselage and wings.

It is just freakin beautiful.

To see why I'm excited check out:
http://www.newairplane.com/787/virtualTour/ 

Big dimmable windows, huge bins, extraordinary fuel efficiency, new levels of quiet.

In a world filled with bad news, it is sure nice to visualize what the collective talents of Boeing's  engineers, designers, and craftspeople have achieved.

As far as the various delivery delays go, I say, so what! The real question is "will it be worth the wait?". 

By all measures I'd say "Absolutely!"

Roadboy's Travels © 2010

JFK's Assassination and The Power of A Word

A Walk on a Hot Summer Evening in Dallas

At one time the words "Pearl Harbor" simply defined a place. The same could be said for other places such as Waterloo, Omaha Beach, and Columbine. These "place" words (just like "Pearl Harbor") have morphed from defining a "place" to an "event".

Last night as I walked in downtown Dallas. I realized that, despite a new light rail, elegant lofts, and lovely new parks, Dallas shares a similar fate. It cannot shake the stigma of being the "place" where a terrible thing happened. And, the inability to heal is characterized by a single word.

Time to digress.

Most of my generation remembers where we were when we heard that President Kennedy had been shot. I was 7 years old and was at recess playing four square. The news stopped our game. When we got home, Walter Cronkite tearfully informed America that JFK had been pronounced dead.

To my generation President Kennedy was special. He embodied how we felt about America. He was smart, brash, and rich. He was young, athletic, cocky and very handsome. He was a war hero. He could disarm the most jaded reporter with humor. His beautiful wife defined style around the world. They made us all feel "cool".

His death quickly brought us down to earth. We suddenly felt vulnerable. We wanted answers. We needed answers.

Who did it? Why? Was it the Russians? The Cuban's? The Mafia? Was this the first step in some kind of attack?

Or, could a scrawny little loser like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone really defeat our elite secret service and pull off this nightmare?

Remember, we were TV's first generation. We had complete confidence that at the end of every show Perry Mason would neatly wrap up every case.

No neat tidy answers in Dallas.

Then before we could get answers from Oswald, in a blaze of flashbulbs, Jack Ruby, emerged from nowhere and shot Oswald right before our eyes on national television.

The Dallas JFK Memorial

In my Dallas walk the first thing I came upon was the inexplicably, clunky, Phillip Johnson designed JFK memorial. Like much of Johnson's design legacy, as it ages it feels trite, vacuous and cheap. It doesn't measure up to the man. A faded and bent interpretive plaque in front of it tells us that it was  "refurbished". Yet, in such a shimmering city, this monument conveys pure neglect. It leaves the wound open. It should be replaced.

And here is where I first confront the one word that prevents healing.

"Alleged"

As I read the plaque I was left with the sentiment "how could they be so careless?"

The biggest investigation in modern history told us, that despite our desire to believe in conspiracies, it was indeed a lone shooter named Oswald who killed our president and derailed history.

The Last View President Kennedy Saw

As I walked past Dealey Plaza I looked up to see what the president last saw. My mind replays the whole scene frame-by-frame from Abe Zapruder's 8M movie. Further ahead is the Texas School Book Depository. To the left is the grassy knoll. Obviously, traffic flow is now reversed from what is was on the day of the motorcade.

I walk up to the book depository where Oswald took his shot from the still ajar sixth floor window.

Oswald's Sixth Floor Perch   

When I get to the Depository building (where the "Sixth Floor" museum has been created), I read its plaque and am confronted by that word again.

Allegedly

To me, these words are offensive. Here's why.

On a previous visit to Dallas I had the honor of listening to retired Dallas Police detective Jim Leavelle. He is one of the only people who had a chance to talk to Oswald before Oswald fell to another assassins bullet.

It was Leavelle who was cuffed to Oswald when Jack Ruby shot him. He was the detective in the tan "ice cream" suit and Stetson hat pulling up wildly on Oswald's cuffs to turn him sideways to minimize Ruby's ability to get a good shot. His image is burned in America's psyche. He is handcuffed to more than Oswald. It is frequently said that Jim is handcuffed to history.

Jim has mentally replayed this thing over and over for almost 50 of his 90 years on this planet.

If Jim is convinced Oswald was the lone shooter (and he is), then I'm good with that.

Detective Leavelle

Why is it that a nation can accept the fact that a trashboy tweaker like Tim McVeigh could blow up a federal building, but we demand a more complex answer to the killing of JFK?

With so many pressing needs confronting the nation, it is time to try to further heal this wound. Simple ways to help do that might be to build a fitting memorial and to remove the words "alleged" and "allegedly" from all text associated with the assassination.

It is time to admit that America's hopes and dreams were dashed by a single creep named Oswald.

Roadboy's Travel © 2010

The Back of The Station Wagon

Thoughts for Father's Day

A big reason why I love to travel is because I spent so much of my formative years traveling with my family.

Loosely defined that was mom, dad, and, for a few years, my sister (and her hefty bag of beer can sized rollers). Sometimes we got to take friends.

We traveled in a variety of huge cars and station wagons. They had names like "Wildcat". There was no such thing as a gameboy or an in car video system. Heck, for most of the time there wasn't even an 8 track. We played states, car bingo, and pretty much just watched the miles tick off across the American west.

If we were driving at night I'd try to tune in one of those massive three letter AM stations like KSL or KFI.

I planned the trips and made sure we stopped to read every historical marker and visited every tourist trap along the way. I know all about cast resin snakes, fireworks stands, and can recite the whole A&W family of burger's menu. I still dream of pecan shakes at Stuckeys.

If dad felt flush we stopped at a real restaurant like a Howard Johnson's. 

Most times we stopped at a city park or at a roadside picnic area under a tree and mom made PB&J's.

We visited virtually every World's Fair in North America and every National Park in the West. We hiked to Delicate Arch. We shivered in summer at Cedar Breaks and ventured into every crater and ice cave we came across. We admired petroglyphs and examined petrified wood. 

Mom and Dad

We stayed a night in Old Faithful Lodge. We visited our relatives in Colorado. We saw bears, foxes, elk, skunks, and coyotes. Most alive - some as roadkill.

There was a styrofoam ice chest and a couple of cartons of Viceroy's in the car. I drank the Shasta's and they smoked the Viceroy's.

Aside from those damned Viceroy's I was in heaven.

All these years later. I still think of the miles of neon signs and wigwam motels in places like Truth or Consequences NM - and those little tiny bars of soap they had.

We drove through lightning storms and rain so intense we could not see the line on the road. We pulled off to bask in the view of the beautiful rainbows that came later. To this day I adore the smell of pines after rain.

Nowadays mom and dad are behind the wheels of a big RV in heaven.

And I'm sure they are still arguing about which off ramp to take.

Miss them so.

Happy Fathers Day Dad. Thank you for sharing all that time with me on the road.

Roadboy's Travels © 2010

Flying High

That Other Smithsonian

I am posting this while flying. The era of In-fight internet is here and the irony of flying while posting this seems pretty appropriate.

This was one of those weeks where despite elaborate planning efforts, everything just wound up going (as my old friend Bill G used to say) "Twist-O". But I won't go into that here.

The good news is that finding myself with a few extra hours on my hands near Dulles Airport allowed me to (finally) go see one of the newer Smithsonian offerings; The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum. As always it is a Smithsonian museum, so it is free, in fact I was met by a smiling security guard who opened the door and offered a very warm and sincere "welcome". It was like they had been waiting for me.

The Exterior is a Cacophony of Slam-it-Together Geometry

The difference here is that they charge $15 to park. This may explain why there is no easy shuttle service to Dulles. They want you to arrive in your personal or rental car.

Officially in Chantilly Virginia, the new museum is pretty darned cool. Sort of the worlds biggest aviation attic. Before entering the museum I thought I'd just go in and be awed by an amazing collection of flying history. What I found was more than awe, it was also pretty moving. The items in here all form the way we live and changed the very geopolitics of our world.

First off, the shear size of it is overwhelming. The entrance is up on the second floor, so after clearing security, the first thing you see way off in the distance is the Space Shuttle Enterprise. And it actually looks pretty small.

Then it hits you. The space shuttle looks small. Geez this place is big!

Real Planes In A Building So Big That Hung From the Ceiling 
They Look Like A Bunch of Kites

The Enterprise

After you make it to the end of the initial observation promenade your eyes fall on a blackbird strategic reconnaissance aircraft. Here is amazing 1964 era Lockheed Skunk Works technology that fell into the direct path of the political wood chipper. Retired twice, it flew off and on until 1999. And although it hasn't flown in over a decade it still looks stealthy and totally sleek today. It is officially the fastest air breathing manned aircraft. Way ahead of its time.

Blackbird #972

I put it in the same category as Lockheed's earlier bit of dark amazement, the U-2 spyplane (not on display). I bring up the U-2 because I actually witnessed one of those taking off (the base staff at NAS Moffett Field referred to it as a "launch") during a high school field trip in 1972. The U-2 provided data to save our bacon over and over. It befuddled the Russians and allowed President Kennedy to understand the extent of the problem we faced in the Cuban Missile Crisis.) These are two of the planes that have helped maintain democracy itself.

I found myself actually getting choked up at the sight of the Apollo space craft, remembering both its successes and tragedies. And my heart moved way up in my throat when I realized the big silver WWII era bomber I was admiring carried the name Enola Gay.

The Plane That Ended Our War With Japan
And Changed The World We Live in Forever

One of Only 3 Boeing Stratoliner's Ordered by Pan Am
(With 33 seats, it could fly pressurized "Above the Weather"
 at 14,000 Feet! )

There is Wiley Post's little plane he flew around the world, and a romantic statue of Colonel Billy Mitchell who was shouted down when during the first world war he stressed the need for an American air force. 

The museum is a showstopper and well worth the drive from it's more crowded Smithsonian brethren on The Mall in DC.  

Roadboy's Travels © 2010