Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Italy Travelog #25
Chia, Sardinia - Friday, 29 May 2025, 1pm

Today is a departure day for many of my colleagues attending President's Club. Some left early today to catch morning flights at CAG airport; others are hanging around until leaving late this afternoon for evening flights. If we'd left today we'd have part of the morning crew, having to catch a 6:15am shuttle to drive almost an hour to CAG airport to catch a 9:15 flight to BCN, one of the few logical connections for heading back to the US. Instead we extended our stay an extra day; on our dime. We figured once we're hailing our asses out here, 6,000 miles from home, it's worth staying more than 2½ days. And we're making today another take-it-easy-around-the-resort day.

After breakfast and a morning oopsie today we relaxed in our room a bit before heading out to the beach. Sadly this resort hotel is not actually on the beach. As I showed in my first blog upon settling in to the hotel you can barely even see the beach from the hotel. And the beach you can (barely) see isn't even the hotel's beach. The hotel's beach is 4km away.



We packed a canvas bag with sunscreen, a few bottles of water, and a USB charger, and caught one of the hotel's golf cart shuttles over to the beach. It drops us off in front of the hotel's beach-side cafe, The Dunes, shown above. We are lunch here with colleagues when we arrived on Tuesday.



Walking past the cafe we reach the entry to the beach. It's over the dunes from the shuttle stop/parking/cafe area.

Once over the dunes there's a pair of little huts that hand out towels and sell a small selection of drinks. We took our towels, picked a pair of lounge chairs below an umbrella, and kicked off our sandals to head out to the water.



We walked on the wet sand, the edges of teh surf lapping against our toes, to the far end of the beach and back. The water here, the Mediterranean Sea, was cold. It's a beautiful blue but it's cold.



After our walkabout we settled back in our beach chairs. The cold water just wasn't worth spending time in. We nested here for at least an hour, until 12:30, when we decided to get some lunch. We repacked our bag, turned in our towels, and walked back over the dunes to the The Dunes (the cafe) for our meal. After this we'll ride a golf cart back to the hotel, rest in our room a bit, then head up to the spa for another bout with the not-quite-Roman baths.

Italy Travelog #17
Chia, Sardinia - Tuesday, 27 May 2025, 4:30pm

Our flight from Rome to Cagliari this morning was uneventful. And mercifully short, at 1h15m. That's because we were cramped into average-minus economy seats— not that Aeroitalia even has roomier seats, except in the exit rows— and there was no wifi. Sigh. Yet another budget European carrier. At least so far they've only joked about having to pay €5 to use the toilet.

BTW, if you're wondering how to pronounce "Cagliari", it is not Cag-lee-ARR-ee. That's kind of an Anglo pronunciation. In Italian the g is basically silent when paired with an l. Thus the locals all say CAL-yah-ray. It sounds a lot like they're saying Calgary— the city in Alberta, Canada. But fortunately the weather here is better. It's sunny and around 80° today.



It was a long ride in a van from the airport down to our hotel. We're not in Cagliari/Calgary but in the small town of Chia, on the southern tip of the island of Sardinia. Parts of the drive were through fairly rural areas. The roads in this spread-out resort hotel are mostly dirt roads.

Once on the property, we checked in and stowed our luggage. Our room wasn't ready yet. We rode in a golf cart over to a hotel restaurant near the beach. There we met several colleagues and joined them for lunch. And to put our food on my sales VP's tab. 😅 Not that the company isn't paying for it anyway; this is Club.



We drew out lunch waiting for a text from the front desk that our room would be ready. Actually pretty much all of my colleagues were waiting for the same. Around 4pm I gave up because I felt like I was about to fall asleep and rode a golf cart back to the front. Our room was ready; they just hadn't texted us. 😒

The room is large, reasonably comfortable, but also kind of bland. The one interesting feature it does have is a large, private patio (see above). We're on the first floor, though, which kind of means no view.



I lifted my camera up over my head to look over the bushes around our patio. Yeah, we can kinda see the ocean from here. But this is not what I think of when I think "beach resort". I feel like my company either got rooked on picking this location... or cheaped out. I'm already reconsidering my choice to stay an extra day here at my own expense. It's not worth the nightly rate for this. 😔

Alaska Travelog #23
Outside Seward - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 4:30pm

Today's been a day of shorter hikes and visits around Seward. We started with a milder hike to an overlook of the Exit Glacier ("milder" being in comparison to our butt-kicker of a hike partway above the glacier on Monday), followed by a bit of gentle 4x4ing on the river bed. Now we've driven around the far side of the bay to Fourth of July Beach.



From here we're actually looking across Resurrection Bay to Seward on the opposite shore. We're technically still in Seward, though. In Alaska city limits seem to stretch miles away. For example, when we were in Anchorage we stopped in places 100 miles apart that were all called "Anchorage".

But hey, it's a beach! Er, gravelly shoreline. And the high temperature today is... 57° F. And there's a blustery wind. So, not exactly what you think of when you think "beach" in the summer. Oh, and it's next to an industrial site. In fact I had to employ some creative direction-finding to find public roads around the industrial complex and its many "No Trespassing" and "No Parking Beyond This Sign" signs to get to this public beach.

Back on the road— "road" being generous here, as named streets in this part of the city are gravel—I drove inland a bit to try seeing Fourth of July Creek. There's a gravel road that parallels it for a bit. When I saw a dirt two-track going off through the hedges toward the creek I tried exploring it in our SUV.

I marveled to myself at how there was such solitude here... until I rounded a bend and saw a truck parked in the path ahead of us. Then, as we got closer, I noticed that the truck was abandoned... and wrecked. 😰 "Well, that's a little bit scary," I said aloud.

We didn't let the wreck deter us from exploring further on foot. ...Yeah, that's exactly how horror movies start. 🤣



The wreck was about as far as we'd have been able to drive on the trail anyway, so it didn't cost us anything in terms of access. We picked our way around it then across the tumbled river rocks. If this creek looks like the glacial outflow from Exit Glacier it's because it is a glacial outflow. Above us in those mountains is Godwin Glacier.

Los Cabos Travelog #16
Viceroy hotel San Jose del Cabo - Wed, 8 May 2024, 9am

It's another taking-it-easy morning here in San Jose del Cabo. Like yesterday morning I awoke early (sunrise is 5:40am) and relaxed on our deck overlooking the pools. And it's not just this morning I'm taking it easy. Yesterday after coming back from our snorkeling trip I was pretty wiped. I took a nap for an hour or two before dinner.

Dinner last night was on our own. While some of my colleagues went looking for expensive food, likely to use up the dining allowance, Hawk and I kept it simple. Like I've said before, we're generally not fans of fancy food. We found a local-style place within easy walking distance and walked over there. I ordered a plate of two tacos while she got a plate of two small mushroom quesadillas. We split a dish of guacamole to enjoy with our chips. Altogether it was a light meal and not very expensive; about $25 all-in.

Light meals seem a bit strange to us as US-ians. We've become accustomed to the gut-busting portions normalized over the past 25-30 years. I still remember what meals used to look like, though. These were adult sizes in the long-long ago. Which means they left us room to enjoy a modest dessert afterward. 🤣 We split an order of churros with chocolate and caramel sauce at a cafe on the walk home.

Well, back to the here-and-now. It's rolling up on 9am Wednesday morning. That means the lazing around on our deck is coming to an end. In a few minutes we're going up to the lobby to meet our group for today's activity— ATV rides in the desert!

Los Cabos Travelog #13
Viceroy San Jose del Cabo - Mon, 6 May 2024, 11pm

This evening our company held a welcome soirée for Club. It was in the "bird nest" just outside our room. (Though actually it looks more like a squirrel nest or maybe a beaver den.)

Yes, this was a welcome reception even though Hawk and I have already been in the area for two days. We pre-extended our trip, paying for the extra two nights on our own. Today's the official arrival day and is why we switched hotels and checked in to the Viceroy.

At the soirée we ate and drank until around 9. Hawk went back to our room after that while I went upstairs to the bar on the roof to drink some more with colleagues. There are some people in the group who drink like fish. I'm trying to respect my own limits and not get sick or get so sloshed I do something stupid. (One colleague already dived into a 4' deep pool and got a bloody forehead from hitting the bottom. 😨) Even so, I drank more than I really wanted to tonight. ...But not so much that I'll be sick. I think. 😰

Club gifts were slightly less generous this year than last. Recall last year in addition to a bag of towels and flip-flops and suntan lotion and crap like that we got a nice USB speaker and... oh, did I mention?... $800 cash. This year there's no valuable item like a USB speaker. I did consider bringing mine from last year to use in the room but decided not to as I imagined we might get another one this year. 😂 Alas, no. And instead of $800 cash we have an allowance to spend up to $800 on food and file an expense report for reimbursement.

An $800 expense limit is not the same as $800 cash. $800 cash is $800 in your pocket, literally. Last time we took the $800 cash meant for 3 days of food and drink and stretched it to cover not only all our meals for 5 days but also the costs of a rental car for two days to tour the island on our own and other incidentals.

An expense limit means up to $800. And we've got to eat $800 of food and drink— or at least order it and throw it away 🤣— to get the full amount. But we don't have expensive tastes. And we're allergic to paying ridiculous resort prices even for basic food. That bougie $133 lunch? We only did that because we knew we were eating on other people's money. And even with OPM we couldn't stand to do it more than once. It's just not our character to spend money wastefully even when it's not ours.

Los Cabos Travelog #6
Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos - Sun, 4 May 2024, 9:30am

Last night I crashed early. By 9pm I was already fighting sleep, so I went to bed at about 9:30 and fell asleep right away. This morning I woke at 5am, briefly, and saw that it wasn't yet sunrise. The sky was starting to get light, though. Dawn comes early here! I feel back asleep and woke around 6. The sun had just risen, though we couldn't see it through our balcony doors as we're facing west.

I spent an hour sitting out by the plunge pool waiting for Hawk to wake up and get ready.



With a setup like this it's tempting not to leave. We were hungry, though, so we went downstairs for breakfast around 7am. Breakfast was bougie just like lunch though better quality and half the price. The full breakfast buffet was $20 before tax and gratuity. Though ordering a class of Coke Zero added another $7 and change to the tab. 😨 Yeah, I won't do that again tomorrow.

After breakfast we came back to our pool terrace and spent the rest of the morning there. Well, the rest until almost 10am, anyway. 10 is when we scheduled room service to come. That's our self-imposed goal for when to get going.

Los Cabos Travelog #4
Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos - Sat, 4 May 2024, 4pm

Our plan for today was simple: we'd get to our hotel in Los Cabos, check in, eat lunch, and figure out what to do for the rest of the day. The schedule got a little late with all the waiting at the airport after we landed. Then checking in at the hotel entailed so much personalized service it felt like the part of buying a car where the price negotiation is done and now you've got to finish all the official paperwork with the F&I guy. You know, the part where you're like, "Cool, I've made a deal on this great car, now I want to drive home!" except they want to show to sign a few forms and then show you how to unlock the doors and turn on the windshield wipers. But, hey, our room is amazing.

That amazing room is part of a swank resort. We knew that meant getting lunch at the hotel cafe by the beach would be an awfully bougie experience. Generally we don't care for bougie lunch. Normally we'd go somewhere off-site for a fraction of the price and none of the pretentiousness but it was a'ready late— 2:30pm by the time we able to start lunch— so we went to the cafe this once as the quickest solution. It was a bit more bougie than we expected.



How bougie was it? Three things:

1. I arrived wearing a hat, so they brought me a hat rack to stand by the table.
2. They brought a battery powered fly swatter to keep flies away from our food.
3. The food was uninspired and bland, safe for people on their first trip out of Iowa, and the bill came to $133. 😨 (And that's with only one drink apiece.)

Los Cabos Travelog #0
At home - Fri, 4 May 2024, 10:00pm

This evening Hawk and I have been packing for our next adventure trip. I know, I'm not even done posting blogs from our New Zealand trip— I've got probably 15 journal entries still to go!— and here were are getting ready to head out again. And no, it's not Alaska. Though I wrote earlier today about planning an Alaska trip, that's not 'til June. It's not even the next trip. It's, like, four trips away in the future. Tomorrow morning we're leaving for a nine days in Los Cabos, Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona.

The Los Cabos part of the trip is the President's Club trip I won at work. Well, part of it is club. The club trip is 4 days and starts Monday. We chose to extend the trip, at our own cost, for an extra two days, flying down there Saturday morning. We'll be off on our own at a beautiful resort (more on that soon!) before joining the company group after two days at a different hotel.

Club is over on Thursday. Instead of flying home or extending another three days in Los Cabos (the five we've planned are plenty) we'll fly to Phoenix, Arizona. We'll be there for three days at a nice hotel with a waterpark. Splashing around in pools at a hotel in the US is kind of more our speed than visiting an overly commercialized, "foreign lite"  resort. And my in-laws are flying out from Pennsylvania to join us for those 3 days in Phoenix. That Sunday we'll fly home... and they'll fly with us, to visit us in California for a few days.

Anyway, it's late Friday night here. Our flight leaves in about 10 hours. We're pretty much all packed. And we're packed fairly lightly. This trip is all leisure, no work. No work clothes, no work computer. Just shorts, light shirts, two pair of sandals, two swim trunks, and a few bottles of suntan lotion.

Australia Travelog #11
Bondi Beach - Tue, 26 Dec 2023, 11:30am

Today we're starting our "Visit ALL the beaches!" hike with Australia's famous Bondi Beach. (And TBF we're hardly visiting all the beaches, just 6 or 7 or so.) And we decided that we'll travel like locals. Instead of hiring a ride via Uber we took the bus.



It helps that Sydney has a pretty well-developed system of public transit. You don't even need to fuss with a fare card to ride a bus or tram. You can tap on and tap off with a credit card... and you get the same rate as if you had a fare card. It's much easier than having to deal with buying fare cards, keeping them topped up, and— as a visitor from thousands of miles away— leaving town with several dollars stranded on a fare card you probably won't use again before it expires in a year or two.

Cost-wise the bus was a reasonable deal vs. Uber. Two tickets were less than 1/3 the cost of hailing a ride, and there's a bus line (#333) that operates from a stop three blocks away from our hotel and goes right by Bondi Beach. Not having to fuss with transfers made the bus an easy pick. Plus, we enjoy traveling like locals in our style of self-directed sightseeing.



Bondi Beach was... well, a beach. I mean, it looks like any other nice beach, with lots of light colored sand, blue-green water, and warm, sunny weather. Around 11am when we rolled up it was busy but not thronged. Likely by later today it'll be a mob scene.



We shucked off our shoes and socks and headed across the sand. The water was COLD! We'd thought we might enjoy wading for a bit, but just getting in up to our shins briefly told us it would not be pleasant. We scurried back to where the water only came up to our toes, though not before a breaker hit us across our knees dampened our shorts. Well, we came dressed for that possibility! And in the warm weather we're confident we'll dry quickly. Remember, late December is mid summer down under!

This weekend was a weird one when I look back on it. It was split between joy of living and sorrow for the dead. Yet as disjoint as those two activities may seem there's a common thread between them.

The dead is my friend Del, whom I've written about many times here. He passed on Tuesday. His memorial service was Sunday. "We should spend all day Saturday and Sunday with his family," Hawk suggested. "No," I responded flatly. "I will spend at most one day this weekend mourning the dead, and since the service is on Sunday it should be Sunday."

Was I being cold by drawing a firm line around mourning? No. My life is too short to pour out days and weeks in mourning. I will mourn the dead and I will support the grieving, but it's not a blank check. There are limits.

Plus, I'll add, it was unclear that they want us there anyway." Del's husband, D., has three housemates. And a friend who regularly visits several days a week. And his parents are in town. And his sister and her husband are in town. And his cousin and her husband are in town. I was sure the house would be full. More well-wishers would be a nuisance, not a help.

So Saturday we stayed around home. Hawk had a friend, Talia, visiting from Maryland, anyway, to pick up her son, Lake, from a summer program at Stanford. We had lunch with Talia then met both of them for dinner Saturday night after Lake finished his last final exam.

In between lunch and dinner, Hawk and I spent a while at the pool. We invited Talia but she was too tired from her early morning flight. She took a nap to be fresher for dinner. Speaking of dinner, it was awesome. The food was great, the company was great, it was great to see Lake as a late teen now after seeing him occasionally over the years since infancy.

Sunday the issue of how much time to spend at the house of morning cropped up again. I repeated my objection about excessive sacrifice and my concern that we'd be more of a burden than a help. We texted our friends to get their opinion, and they agreed. We'd go to their house just before the memorial service to drive them over to it. Alleviating them from having to drive would be a help. Crowding their house all day would not.

We kind of ate lunch at home on Sunday. I say "kind of" because Hawk ate at home while I grabbed a couple slices of pizza and a soda at Costco when I went shopping there. The food was less than $5. At today's prices $5 is closer to the cost of eating at home than dining out, so I'll count that. 😅

After lunch we went out to the pool again. Twice in one weekend, yay!



While the heat of the day had broken by 3pm on Saturday when we managed to get out to the pool, on Sunday we got there before 2pm and it was still hot. In fact I think it was getting hotter mid-afternoon. The day topped out at 94°, I saw later.

The photo above is similar to many I've posted in recent weeks. It also shows that I don't always go beer in hand to the pool. Sometimes I bring Gatorade... or water!

After the pool we cleaned up, dressed in somber clothes, and headed up north to support our friends in mourning. They were surprised to have us at the house an hour early, but fortunately there was not a crowd that point. D's family had all gone back to their hotels to change for the memorial service, so we were able to hang out in a low-key fashion with D and his housemates.

The memorial service was nice. It was hosted at a small restaurant owned by a family friend. It's the same place where Del and D and got married just over 3 years ago. The service was conducted in a low-key Jewish style, as D and his family are Jewish though Del was not. Low-key in this case means there was no rabbi though there were traditional prayers in Hebrew. And brisket was served afterward. 😂

Prior to the service I had an interesting chat with a friend of D's from graduate school. We had an upbeat conversation about how getting older has made us more concerned about spending our time well as we have less and less of it left. I noted that Del's death underscored my thinking on the matter as he was just 6 months older than me. And that brings me back to what I wrote at the top of this blog entry. Sorrow needs a limit. Grieve as you must, but let's plan to pick up the pieces and move on. Life goes on. Let's spend what little time we have finding joy and not squander it crying over the past.