San Diego, March 12

I have arrived in San Diego and I will start posting about travel again. This site is on record for my tribute to Flo, who will remain very much in my thoughts, and I hope it works to have the link to that tribute prominent under the title of this blog.

I'll see how it works to report on activities day-by-day, and report on big trips this way rather than spend a lot of time afterwards on trip reports. I'll start with my flight: leaving midday from Kansas City, my practice is to stop at Subway on the way, rather than pay high airport concession prices, and have a sandwich onboard with a coupon-bought beer if flying Southwest. We didn't have the snow that was possible, just chill and drizzle. As it's the start of Spring Break for many, there were crowds at the airport; this flight also had several people getting a cruise. It's been showing as sold out for a while; they were looking for one volunteer to bump, and it hasn't been too clear to me how that works on Southwest, and I couldn't arrive much later.

When I checked in right at the 24-hour mark, I got boarding pass A41. I took an aisle seat at the front of the rear flight attendant's section, the seatmates were fine, I had my sandwich with a beer, and dozed a bit on this, one of the longest possible flights from Kansas City. Although we were a few minutes late taking off, we arrived 30 minutes early. Although I won't be driving much, there was such a good deal for a rental car from Alamo that I took that, and got to the hotel, the Island Palms on Shelter Island.

Here things were nice in that they upgraded me to a Junior Suite, with a living area and two TVs, but the remote was completely haywire. Also wi-fi wasn't connecting, so I'm writing this first part offline. The key cards needed to be replaced a couple of times.

Then I got help from SlowTrav leader Kim in getting wi-fi to work. I’m back now from the evening event: went to Jane’s house, riding with Roz, and Nico visiting from Italy. So many people showed their support, and it’s an important step in things at this stage. There was a great assortment of small things (antipasti) to eat. Although the temperature was nice from what I came from, it was chilly for an outdoor event, but people were well prepared and bundled. At this late hour, I’ll stop there on this report.