Well, in the end, Chantal and I both made it out of DC on the same flight. It was snowing pretty good when we left so I think it was a very good thing that we got out when we did. It avoided scurrying around trying to put together a Plan B. If it snows as much as is forecast, Plan B would likely be watching the Superbowl at home. That wouldn't have bothered me too much, but it would have meant that Chantal probably would not be able to trek up to the top of Mt. Fansipan in Vietnam. Of course, she might not be able to to do that anyway, but at least now she has a shot at it. It's her birthday today, so the travel gods have been good. We are lugging three bikes around with us. We have our two travel bikes plus a bike frame for Mr. Joe in Vietnam. My original intention was that we would put all our stuff on a plane and have it checked all the way through to Hanoi. As it is now, with a layover night in NY, we will have to retrieve our all our stuff and recheck it tomorrow. That is a definite pain in the rear. The frame is in a full size bike box. While it's not heavy, it's unwieldy and difficult to manage with everything else. I unlocked (and “jailbroke”) my iPhone this morning. Yeah I know. It voids the warranty. But I would like to use the phone when I am overseas. When I was in Canada a few weeks ago, I had a small taste of the kind of rates AT&T charges for roaming (it might be the otheer carrier with the high rates...I am not sure). The bottom line is that if you want to use the phone overseas (which I do) there really is no choice. It took all of 5 minutes to do it. Supposedly, I can reset it back to the original locked state. I will do that when I return in March. A few hours later... We made it to JFK without a problem. We stashed the bike at left luggage. I didn't think that there were any left luggage places at any US airports (for security reasons). It is very convenient so I was glad to find it. An airport worker told me that the fee for leaving a bag was nominal. It turned out to be $16 dollars per day. I suppose in NY there is a different meaning to the word nominal. In Bangkok, it's $2.50. We hadn't made a hotel reservation in NY since we weren't entirely sure the plane was going to leave DC. We were therefore in need of finding a place when we arrived. The service desk at the airport said their least expensive room near the airport was $170, We ended up using our cell phones to bid on a room via Priceline. We ended up at the Hilton for $97 total with taxes which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a very good deal indeed. I am posting this to the blog using Posterous. We will see how that works out. You create an email and then send it to a posterous email account from which it is reposted to wherever you choose. The advantage of this is you can create your post offline and then use email to easily post when you have internet access. The big question is how well it will be formated and whether images make it through. If this looks like hell you'll know why. I am tossing in this picture just to see how if it makes it through....
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