eldar: (Default)
2007-06-04 05:47 pm

Blame It All On Google

The past weekend will go down as "one of those", and as far as where things really started to go wrong, I need look no further than Google Maps directions to our hotel in DC.

The plan was to drive down to Washington for the weekend, and see the sights, and visit an LJ friend of [livejournal.com profile] arosoff's.  Aside from sticky traffic and equally sticky weather all the way down (particularly through Delaware), the trip went well right up to the point where we'd got into DC and turned right off New York Avenue onto First Street....

Y'see, Washington has an interesting street naming system: it has A Street, B Street, C Street, and so on, with A Street being the most southerly. In this scheme, there is, as you might expect, a street named N Street.

Google Maps thinks it's clever though, and whilst in many ways it is (it knows Washington's one-way system on a Friday, which is different to what it is on a weekend), in other respects, it's not. It sees N Street and thinks "hmm, N, that's an abbreviation for North, so on my directions, I'll print North Street". Oops. It wasn't until we'd driven round and round that we'd worked out what the directions were supposed to be doing (i.e. navigating us through a byzantine one-way system) and that, indeed, we should've taken N Street.

So by this point, having finally got back on track, we now had:

  • 1 very cranky baby

  • 1 increasingly cranky Alexis

  • 1 tired stressed and cranky Neil



Heavy traffic in downtown DC didn't help, and with my eyes on the prize (1 block from our hotel) impatience got the better of me and I decided to pull out from behind a stationary car ahead of me just to make up a couple of extra car lengths.  I just misjudged by maybe 6 inches how close I was to said car in front, with a resulting scraping of bumpers.  Cue exchanging of details (in my case... here's the Hertz rental details), and a frustrating evening trying to report to the DC police an accident that they weren't interested in because:

  1. Nobody was hurt

  2. Neither vehicle was badly damaged - both were able to clear the scene

  3. Both parties exchanged details and went on their respective ways



Cue a room service dinner and no chance to take a stroll in the evening.

Admittedly, Saturday turned out okay, and we went round the Air & Space Museum with mucho geeking opportunities at various bits of memorabilia.  Admittedly outdated... very outdated in the case of the Solar System and "Use of Computers in Flight" displays, and embarrassingly so in the case of their hastily put-together patches in the wake of Pluto's re-designation.  Think the Science Museum, but maybe a little more up-to-date.  Dinner in a good restaurant (very good lobster salad, good if unimaginative buffalo steak, fantastic chocolate dessert, well-behaved baby), followed by a night-time visit to the Lincoln Memorial, which is as grandiose and over-the-top as the classical Greek monuments that it was designed to emulate.

Sunday dawned wet, and the concierge confirmed that it was due to rain all day - which scotched our plans to head up to the zoo and see the pandas.  So we drove around DC for a bit, and finally got a good view of the White House in the rear-view mirror as we headed up 16th Street towards Silver Spring.

We made it to Silver Spring in good time, heading to [livejournal.com profile] estherchaya's for lunch and general chatting with her and her husband.  We left there around 3pm, next stop: Hertz counter at Baltimore-Washington International airport.

Ugh. They had to exchange the car, even though the Mazda was perfectly driveable. They gave us a Ford Taurus.

Let me tell you a bit about the Ford Taurus.

It's awful.  It's a total piece of shit.  It has a turning circle that would embarrass a supertanker.  It's so heavy it generates a significant gravitational field.  It has horrible controls.  It has no fucking fog lamps, which I consider absolutely essential when driving in heavy rain on fast, busy, multi-lane highways.  It starts to shudder when I go above 65mph.  It has ridiculously powerful air-conditioning.  Its driving position is too low down (though once I'd stopped at a rest area and played with the seat adjustment controls, this was rectified to some extent).  It's too bloody wide.  I hate this car with a passion.  Sure, the Mazda had its faults, but at least it felt like I was driving a modern motor vehicle.  The Taurus, on the other hand, is just a traditional American gas-guzzling wagon with a passably modern shell.

I had to pass up a Chevy Malibu in favour of the Taurus too - the Malibu, which I've driven before and know is a perfectly serviceable and comfortable car, wouldn't have been big enough by far.

Then the drive back up I95 and the Jersey Turnpike, in heavy rain all the way, which was more than a little hairy.  Low visibility, heavy traffic, inadequate  headlamps, more-than-inadequate overhead lighting (on the Belt Parkway through Brooklyn, more than half of the overhead lamps were out, and those that did work were incredibly weak, making it incredibly difficult to spot lane markings because there were no cats eyes).  We finally got in at 12.30am, and I zonked pretty much right away.

Today, I have done mostly nothing.

P.S. The London 2012 logo - I bet it would make a great cookie cutter pattern.
eldar: (Default)
2007-05-01 08:46 am
Entry tags:

Tyring

Okay, so I got caught out with my spelling of "tyre". It won't happen again, honest. Anyway, I went looking to see if my actions in getting my tyre changed by the M4 were correct - namely, calling out the AA. It turns out I was indeed acting according to the recommendations in The Highway Code. It also means I've now discovered that The Highway Code is online, which is kinda handy.
eldar: (Default)
2007-04-29 10:09 pm
Entry tags:

Weightlifting

So, I've finally sold my flat. Completion was actually last Tuesday, but I still had to clear some furniture out. However as the new owner wasn't moving in - he was gutting the place prior to refurbishment and renting it out - he allowed me to pick the stuff up this weekend. I duly hired a van, and with the help of Dave from work, cleared it out on Saturday. I drove it all down to Devon, and dumped it in my parents' garage* I drove back this afternoon, via a quick stop on the M4 to get a tire changed**.

Some things you really don't appreciate about motorways are quite noticable when you're stuck by the side of one:
70mph is quite frighteningly fast when the vehicle doing it passes within 3 feet or so of the AA man changing the tire.
Motorways are very loud.
Vehicles doing 70mph generate on hell of a gust of wind as they go by. Even the really small ones. This is particularly noticeable when you're sat in a high-sided van that is largely empty.

* My parents have an enormous double garage beneath their bungalow, which was previously used by my Dad's business. This is in addition to the garage attached to the house itself. So no problems storing crap.
** No way was I going to change a driver's side tire by the side of the M4, especially with the wimpy jack that came with the van. The AA man instead put his own life on the line, as well as bringing with him far more sensible tools for changing the wheel on a long wheelbase Transit van.
eldar: (Default)
2006-12-24 06:47 pm

Humbug? Bah!

It was my 33rd birthday on Friday. It was a quiet one. We did our food shopping for Christmas Day*, and went to a local Italian restaurant for dinner.

Yesterday was lazy, until Alexis remembered/discovered she didn't have any breadcrumbs. This is a problem: the breadcrumbs she likes are only available on import, and only a few specialist/ex-pat store stock them. The nearest such store is in Hampstead, which I hate driving to and parking in at the best of times. Nevertheless, on the second pass around, I managed to get movie-style parking: right in front of the shop. I should've known; the trip back involved 3, possibly 4, London boroughs (Camden, Islington, possibly Haringey, and then Barnet). The problem with Hampstead, y'see, is turning around to point in the direction you want to. The discovery you can't turn left at a certain point onto Kentish Town road, thus requiring a 2 or 3-mile detour to do the quick, less than a mile as-the-crow-flies, trip between Kentish Town and Tufnell Park.

Today would've been lazy as well, except for:
* Apart from stock, milk, and a few other bits and pieces. Turns out that whilst Waitrose was still opening at 11am, they had a half-hour "browsing" period from 10.30am. I mean, a department store I can understand. But a "browsing" period in a supermarket? Any road, that meant it was already jammed solid. In the end, it wasn't such a bad run, but annoying nevertheless.

Oh, and some tidying up: piles of bit of paper relating to this, that, and the other. I did find a birthday card from my Nan, though, which had a nice surprise tucked into it :-) And I arraned our presents around the "tree" (which is actually a tall lamp in one corner of the room).

Now, maybe, I can relax a bit.