Category: Cars

My second day in Florida was full of one main activity, delivering this server to its new home. I awoke and ate my complimentary breakfast by the pool… which was worth every penny. ugh. Thankfully it was MUCH cooler than the day before. It seemed to be in the 60s, with overcast conditions. It appeared to have rained the night before. Remember how in Miami Vice the streets were always wet… that wasn’t a special effect. Every time I’ve been to Miami, there were puddles everywhere, and nothing has changed. I finally mastered lowering the Beetle’s roof (there is a switch between the seats, which I missed due to the armrest the day before.)

Let me diverge into a mini car review: I have plenty of experience with the VW New Beetle, having owned one for almost 200,000 miles and recently sold it. I always loved the way the Beetle drove, and this one was in some ways even better. My ONLY complaints about it were a bit of wind noise up by my left ear with the top up, and the fact that it had an automatic transmission. Mind you, as autos go, this one was pretty nice… a six speed DSG, but in the end, it was still a slush box. I MUCH prefer to shift myself. Anyway, the driving position was great, the ergonomics awesome. The boot was miniscule, and the back seat sort of a joke. If I had one I’d rip out the back seat and just make it a larger cargo area. It seemed MUCH peppier than my 2.0 liter Beetle ever was, and I discovered the reason why when I popped the hood open: It has an inline 5-cylinder 2.5 liter engine. It has much more torque than my 4-banger could dream of. Nice off-the-line acceleration, and excellent 60-90 jumps… once the damn transmission woke from its slumber a few seconds of agonizing lag after I push the throttle. With a manual tranny, this would be a killer car. It had several nice Teutonic touches, such as:
* a “drop/raise-all windows” with one button control.
* all the windows drop ever so slightly when you grab the door handle. This clears the glass of the weather-stripping as the doors open and close.
* an LCD at the top of the windshield that tells you when the top is fully retracted, or not.

Missing was the playful instrument colors and icons of the ’99 New Beetle I had, replaced with a far more serious-looking instrument cluster. It seemed a bit out of character for this playful sort of car.

Overall, I was VERY happy to have this car for the two days. So much better than a Sebring or a PT Cruiser!

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Driving in Miami and environs hasn’t changed since last time I was here… basically Third World driving conditions and drivers, all contained within a distinctly US package. In other words, drivers swerving over lines and zero lane discipline combined with gigantic SUVs and people yakking on cell phones. Thankfully it got better the farther away from Miami I drove. First stop was Vero Beach, which was about three hours of driving north. As I arrived I called Steven Willis to get directions, and instead left him a message. So I wardrove until I found an open wireless network and looked up his address, plotted it on Google maps, and started navigating my way there. He called as I was within few miles and gave me a few hints. I found his place soon after.

I’ve known Steven for probably a decade, but we’ve only met once before, well over 5 years ago. Funny how the Internet has altered personal relationships like that… I think I have far more “virtual friends” than real these days. in 2004 Steven’s company was knocked off the ‘net by two successive hurricanes. Even though in many ways, we are competitors, I offered to help out any way I could. We set up a server in our facility for Steven to use as a DNS server, so that he could at least have some visibilty to the world. That, along with his evacuation of other critical systems to another location allowed him to weather the storms as best he could. In exchange, he offered us some rackspace to do the same thing. So here I was, finally collecting on that three year old favor, with a tertiary DNS server in the back seat of the Beetle.

Anyway, after a brief chat, we hopped into the Beetle and drove north to Melbourne and the datacenter that Deep Sky built, along with two other regional ISPs after the hurricanes of 2004. It is a nice, shiny new facility, with a modest three rows of cabinets and a lot of purpose-built considerations specific to the region.

Above is the row where our server will live. Below is Steven standing in front of their UPS. I liked the 8′ high conduit penetrations… something which makes no sense in Seattle, and a LOT of sense in Florida!

I unpacked the server and racked it up… only to find it not booting. Ugh. I unracked it, and found a desk to work on while I troubleshot the machine. It was working FINE when we left Seattle, and was carefully packed in the original box… but obviously either it was affected by the water, or rough handling (or both) along the way. I reseated all the connections, RAM, etc and got no joy, so I called the office. Thankfully this one was still under warranty, so I spent the requisite number of hours and troubleshooting steps on the phone with tech support in order to justify an on-site repair tech. That hurdle cleared, I left it behind and took Steven out for a late lunch. He picked an Irish pub, so I had a nice steak and a Guinness. hmmmm. I lost the wrestling match over the check (Steven is much bigger than I) and drove back to Vero Beach. About halfway back we had to put the top up due to rain. I left Steven, thanking him for all his help, and he promised to update me on the on site repair, expected the next day. I drove the rest of the way back to Miami, thankfully being late enough to miss the rush hour traffic. Halfway back I was able to drop the top again!

I arrived back at the hotel to see a crowd of exchange students waiting for the airport shuttle. No Chris though. While I was doing work up north, he was attending orientation. It was about 9 pm and I knew that his flight left around midnight, so he should be leaving soon. I dropped off my stuff in the room, and went back to the lobby for some Internet access (this hotel did not have in-room access!) Sure enough I leaned out to look at the front door and there was Chris, waiting for the bus. He looked around at one point and caught my eye… giving me the “stay where you are” look, so I just waved, and he waved back, giving me so subtle a smile that I doubt anyone else would have noticed it. I watched him from afar for a few minutes, until the shuttle came and took him away. I went back up to my room, slept for a few hours, then got up to head to my flight. The Beetle ragtop was growing on me, and if I could have, I’d have just driven it home. Oh well, I dropped it off, and made my way to the Alaska Air counter for my flight back to Seattle. The inbound flight was late, so my return was delayed. I was able to snag an exit-aisle seat though, and finished my copy of Peter Egan’s “Side Glances” best-of book somewhere over Wyoming.

I landed in Seattle about the same time Chris’ flight landed in Santiago. I came in over the snowy North Cascades, with Rainier’s top half completely shrouded in cloud; I hope that he was able to see the Andes, and Aconcagua in their full summertime glory.

I arrived home late, having suffered through typical Friday night Seattle/Everett traffic, and we went out to dinner at La Hacienda, just three of us.

Chris & I left Las Vegas’ airport on our connecting flight for Miami at some ungodly hour… did I mention it was raining in Las Vegas? Pouring actually. Our luggage was obviously out in the rain for a portion of that time as well, as we later discovered. =\

The flight was long… I slept though most of it. I think Chris didn’t sleep much. I woke up somewhere over the Everglades, and turned to my right to snap the picture above. Christopher looking grumpy and tired. They call it a “red-eye” flight but Chris had a workaround for that. 8)

The plane took a long lazy circle around Miami, and approached from the east, which gave me a chance to gaze out at lonely sailboats, and shipping traffic heading towards the Caribbean. My grandfather was a sailor, and I’ve always had a yearning to hop on a freighter and vanish out to sea… an impulse I will likely never act on. But my memories of his stories are brought to the forefront of my mind whenever I see any sort of craft alone in a vast body of water.

Eventually the marine traffic under the plane became quite dense, and sure enough, we made landfall:

Over Miami beach, then downtown Miami, then landing at the airport. We had a lot to do after that. First of all, navigate to the baggage claim. Miami airport, like so many US airports is undergoing significant construction in an effort to reconfigure itself completely to accommodate the massive growth of “airport security” after 2001. Mind you, there will never, ever be another successful hijacking of any commercial airliner, ever again. Anyone who stands up and announces that they are doing so will be instantly ripped to shreds by the bare hands of every other passenger on the plane. History has shown me to be correct… every attempt since the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center has had that result. But, like all military forces end up preparing to fight the last war, we’re spending vast sums of money preventing something that will never happen again. Ever. The near-term result is a confusing maze of temporary walls and inadequate signage. Thankfully I have an inate sense of direction, and despite the fact that we were one of the last to leave the aircraft (Row 27 of a 757), we were the first to arrive at baggage claim… by a fair margin. Let me tell you though… it was a bit of navigation that would befit a vintage rallymaster. In another twist of bad airport design there were maybe 6 chairs in the entire baggage claim area. Being the first there we staked ours out for a long wait.

I was about to leave Chris and go find a place to get him some Chilean currency and a phone card that would work for calling home from South America, when by some bizarre stroke of luck, his bag appeared on the conveyor… the first one off the plane! As I said earlier though, it was wet. I had given him my amazing Speaker Swag Bag from Macworld Expo, which hopefully was water resistant enough to keep his stuff inside dry. I left him to find my box, and went off to find currency. It was early in the morning, so the airport was sort of dead… and ALL the currency exchange locations in the terminal we were in were closed. Grr. One did have a sign that said, “go to terminal E” or something like that. So I wandered my way over there, to find one currency exchange place “open” but with nobody staffing it! I checked the directory and it listed two such places in this terminal, so I found the other, which was closed but with a sign directing me back to the one I just left. Sigh. Upon close observation the only open currency exchange location did have a doorbell under one of the windows, so I pressed it and … eventually … a woman came out from behind a James Bond like secret door at the back of the glass cage. When I said I needed Chilean currency she just sighed, and went back behind the door! Eventually (I figure the heat makes everyone move so slow down there) a man came out and changed my Benjamin Franklin into a pile of colorful Chilean Pesos:

Wow, that’s forty-two-thousand!

Yes, I’m sure I got ripped off somehow, as all airport based exchanges are a losing proposition, but expediency was more important here. Something they count on. My OS X Calculator.app says I should have gotten 52,724 pesos for my $100. Oh well. The other downside was I could find no phone cards that would work in Chile.

Loaded with almost fifty grand in cash, I wandered back to Christopher, who was guarding my very soggy server box, and his luggage and both our carry-ons. Next up was picking up our rental car. Outside to the shuttle bus, as the rental counter was closed. Stepping outside, both of us wilted instantly in the heat. Here it was February, and it was hotter than our hottest summer day in the Pacific Northwest. Worse yet, the humidity was crushing. Even in the “wet” Pacific Northwest, the humidity ranges stay pretty moderate. But here it was, before 8am and already the temp and humidity were unbearable. We waited for an Alamo rent-a-car shuttle to come… seemingly for 45 minutes… while several busses for every OTHER rental car company went by multiple times. True to form, when an Alamo bus DID come, two of them arrived simultaneously. Go figure. I had reserved a car online prior to our departure, and requested a convertible. I figured since I was going to be doing a lot of driving in two days, I should at least get something fun. My paperwork said “Ford Mustang or equivalent.” The way Alamo works, at least at this location, is that you confirm your paperwork on a self-service kiosk, and then just walk out and pick a car. Cool. We wander out to the convertibles to find this array:

Chrysler Sebring, PT Cruiser, PT Cruiser, PT Cruiser, PT Cruiser, VW New Beetle, PT Cruiser, PT Cruiser, PT Cruiser.

Chris & I looked at each other, and both said “The Bug!”

Simple choice really. The only doubt was the ability to carry our luggage. So we shoved Chris’ big bag into the boot, my big server box into the backseat (it BARELY fit!), and our carry-ons on the floor, and presto! It all fit. The Bug was ours! I fiddled with the roof, but could not get it to retract, but Chris said it was too hot anyway, so we just blasted the AC and found our hotel.

I had told them to expect us early and to PLEASE have our room ready, as we’d likely go straight to sleep. Thankfully they did as I asked and we fell straight to bed. I don’t even recall lying down… and likely was asleep before I was fully horizontal. I think Chris was the same. Still on Pacific time, we were both still in the wee hours of the morning.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Around noon, I woke up, called Sue, let her know we made it. Showered, etc. Woke Chris up and we went to find some food. We wandered south from our location, into a swanky area called Coral Gables, looking for a place where we could sit down and be served. We saw plenty of places, but just nowhere to PARK! We eventually gave up and wandered back north towards the hotel and found an IHOP. Not exactly my first choice, but it worked. The service was actually good, and Chris & I sat and had a nice long chat. I managed to get all the info I wanted transmitted into his teenage brain in preparation for his first long stay away from home over the past 24 hours, so I was pretty happy. After lunch we wandered back to the hotel and just vegged out for a while… watching movies on my laptop. We made our way through DVD1 of South Park’s 2nd season when the phone rang. It was the AFS people, calling Chris for the start of his orientation. He wandered off to check in, and came back abruptly to say that they wanted him to move to a different room and see me off. He was obviously upset, as he wasn’t mentally prepared to say good-bye to me at that very moment. I told him it was OK, and gave him a hug. I suspected this would happen, and told him to focus on the orientation, and have a great six months. He would be with his host family within a few days and all would be well. At that, we parted.

I don’t recall much from the rest of that evening… a few phone calls, some work emails… but in reality I was in a sort of haze. Chris was off on his own for the first time ever. I know that Sue & I have prepared him well for this, but the separation event itself is always something of a shock. I went to sleep early. Sleep for me is a coping mechanism for all sorts of ills.