Category Archives: Travel

Not by Southwest

Unfortunately, I have bad news for the many friends I was hoping to see at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin: I won’t be attending this year. Not that my three-year attendance streak was much to brag about, but I was really looking forward to showing up there for a fourth year. In spite of my criticisms about last year’s show, I still had a great time, learned a lot and left Austin wanting to come back.

However, I have pretty good reasons for why I had to cancel. First, I’m heading to San Francisco in mid-March for a business trip. At the end of my trip, I’m going to take my eleven year old nephew with me for a trip to Paris to see my dad. It’ll be his first trip abroad, which is exciting for him and exciting for me, too. We’ll be there for a week at the end of March, so if you have any recommendations on how to entertain a pre-teen in the City of Lights (or its environs), please let me know.

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Paris Is Burning (for Now)

Sorry, sorry; I’m having a hard time getting back into the swing of things after my trip to Paris. Between that and the holiday rush, there doesn’t leave much time for my duties here on this blog.

Actually, I hadn’t anticipated falling off the blogging wagon so easily. I fully expected to be blogging regularly from Paris, but after that initial entry, all of my best intentions flitted away. I was doing a lot of walking around town, taking photographs, spending time with my dad, seeing friends and fighting jet lag; somehow the idea of being productive on my laptop at the end of each day lost out to just resting and relaxing.

I had a great time in Paris, as I always do. In fact, its vivid beauty is so universally acknowledged and accurate that there’s almost nothing original I can write in further praise of it. If you’ve never visited, suffice it to say that it lives up to its reputation in every way — and with each repeat visit, it reveals something new and characteristically stunning.

It’s certainly not perfect, though. For various reasons, I was ready to come home by the end of the week — one of the primary ones being that I got fed up with the Parisian predilection for smoking like it’s going out of style.

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From My Left Feet to the Left Bank

I’m a little burnt out on blogging, so forgive me folks for having been somewhat absent here over the past few weeks. Fear not; I fully intend to regain my mojo before too long. In the meantime, though, I’m trying to get through December’s litany of social distractions: the holiday season, for one, and just a little bit more travel before the calendar’s done, too.

If you’re also coping with the former, and if you’re in New York City, what better way to ease yourself through the December craziness than by spending it with a passel of your peers at AIGA New York’s Annual Holiday Party? Last year’s was a bit of a mob scene, but this year we’re upping the ante: dancing, a bigger, more spectacular venue, dancing, an auction of design goodies, dancing, and M.C. services provided live and in person by the inimitable John Hodgman — for real! The party is this coming Sunday night and tickets are a measly US$20.

The day after the party, I’m heading out to Paris again to visit my father for about a week. My goal is to visit him there twice a year, for at least as long as I can cobble together enough incredible shrinking dollars to pay for meals in Euros. Oof. I’m bringing a brand new, work-issued MacBook with me, so in theory I’ll be blogging a bit. It all depends on whether I find some cool stuff to do or not. If you know of anything, drop me a line. Otherwise, happy holidays!

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Don’t Ever Leave the Airport

While my trip to New Mexico was thoroughly enjoyable — you can now see my pictures posted to Flickr — I’ve just about had it with traveling.

Thanks to a combination of inclement weather and corporate incompetence, my return trip from Albuquerque, NM to New York City took a total of twenty-four hours. My original and re-scheduled flights were delayed, canceled or, through airline mismanagement, never properly booked no less than six times, causing me to spend virtually all day yesterday sitting on my rear at airport gates. It felt like a miracle when I limped home at 1:00a on Tuesday morning after first setting out for the airport late on Sunday evening.

For me, there are two take-aways from this misadventure: first, I’ll never again violate my personal rule of avoiding layover itineraries when traveling across the continental United States, especially if I’m flying into or from relatively small market destinations like Albuquerque. It’s just too risky; when a scheduled flight is canceled or delayed, the paucity of flight alternatives can be disastrous. Direct is the only way to go.

Second, I’ll never again fly the airline I flew to and from Albuquerque — whose name, in the interest of discretion, I won’t reveal here. That’s right, I’m not saying who it was that squandered an entire day of my life. Not even if you call me names, put a curse on my subway line, or even if you acronym-ize the title of this blog post.

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Way Out West

This weekend I’m in the beautiful state of New Mexico visiting my good friends Gong and Bonnie, who live in Santa Fe. It’s my first trip here ever, and it’s beautiful. The light, in particular, is unnaturally gorgeous. Or, at least, that’s how I’m explaining the photos I’ve been taking today.

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SXSW Sxetches

DoodlesWhat kind of photographer am I if I don’t bring my camera around with me wherever I go? Not much of one, apparently. Lately, I’ve been frustrated with the total bulk that my Nikon D70 requires when I travel — lenses, flash, batteries, etc.

In fact, I didn’t bring it with me to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival, choosing to leave it at home so that I could move more quickly through the airport (bringing it along would have required me to check one bag). This is why I have no photographs from the show, but if you’re looking for visual documentation, there’s some wonderful shots from Lisa Whiteman at her Flickr account, and similarly beautiful work from Naz Hamid on his Flickr account, too.

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Pint-Sized Pictures

Sketches from ParisRemembering back to the last set of on-the-street sketches I did in Paris, I made sure to bring my little Moleskine pocket book and a pen with me just about everywhere I went last week. I managed to knock out several pages of drawings, the highlights of which I’m posting here. There aren’t as many as I’d like, but I came up with some stuff I was happy with.

I had a good time with these doodles; I always do have a good time doodling. I don’t know exactly why it takes traveling all the way to Europe for me to actually do something I enjoy so much. Well, I guess the obvious reason that, I’m usually not working when I’m in Paris, and when I’m in New York, I usually am working. Funny what a little bit of free time can do for one’s more artistic pursuits.

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Cities as Applications

On my brief hop through London and Paris, I started thinking about the idea of touristic usability. Isn’t that an awesome term? It’s got eight syllables and I just made it up.

Aside from being a mildly absurd extension of our professional design vernacular, there’s actually a real idea behind this phrase: given any new city, there are certain things that should be easy for tourists to comprehend without assistance.

These things might include: how and when to use the subway or bus, how and where to buy fares for public transportation, how to make a call at a public telephone, how and where to flag a taxi, what to expect upon entering and leaving the airport, how and where to find postal services, how and where to find a police station, et cetera.

Of course, these are things you can find in any decent tourist’s guide, and any sensible traveler will pack such a book. But it struck me, while muddling through my first trip to London in seven years (and even, to an extent, on my third visit to Paris in less than twenty-four months), that these are things that should be inherently usable, as well.

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Back from the Future (of Web Apps, and from Paris)

I start out with the best of intentions when I travel, but as you can see, I haven’t blogged nearly as much as I’d have liked to while on this trip — which, ideally, would have been more than zero posts. Tomorrow, it’s back to the States, winding up this London/Paris tour after just over a week, so I’m squeezing in this update.

London was lots of fun, but a little stressful; spreading a panel appearance, a solo talk and a half-day workshop across three days turns out to be one of the less relaxing ways to see a city, as it turns out. Still, I had a great time there, thanks in part to the warm hospitality of the folks at Carson Systems, who really know how to put on a terrific conference. It’s pretty amazing what their small team manages to pull off, and if you’re thinking of heading to their upcoming Future of Web Design or Future of Online Advertising conferences, you’ll be just as impressed, I’m sure of it.

I did a lot more kicking back here in Paris, where the food, wine and décor is a world apart. Amazing, is the word. No offense meant to London town, but this city gets further under my skin with each visit; it’s thoroughly — at times unconscionably — beautiful. I like it here a lot. If only I’d paid attention in eighth grade French class, I might actually be able to carry on a conversation here, as well. At the very least, I was able to be here for my father’s sixty-ninth birthday, which makes me very glad. All around, a worthy leg of the journey.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m off to get one more ridiculously, ridiculously good meal. I’ll be back in the blogging seat within a day or two, and before too long, publishing some more substantive posts in which I’ll share some of what I presented in London.

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