Tag: travel

This girl is living my dream and I’m so jelly

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BI: Philadelphia fashion photographer capitalizes on constantly oversold route, extends Italian vacation several days and makes over $3K in flight vouchers while getting free hotels and food

Let me tell you how envious I was feeling when reading this story.  This girl managed to accomplish something that I’ve tried to do in the past to no success, and on a scale that I could only dream about.  Having the flexibility and lack of commitments enough to where she could just say fuck it and stay in Italy for as many days as American Airlines constantly kept overselling their Naples to Philadelphia route, and volunteering to take the bump; this is the stuff that my dreams used to be made of.

I’ve actually never been able to accomplish this even once before, even at the piddly domestic level.  Even if there’s been opportunities to volunteer my position for even a nominal, $300-400 flight credit, either I’ve been beaten to the punch or my flexibility wasn’t prohibitive enough for me to go for it, and I’ve always sat in terminals or on flights, fantasizing over the what-if, I could accomplish it, and get some large amounts of house money in which I could then parlay into bigger and better trips, or even some first-class accommodations instead.

One holiday a long time ago, I booked on Thanksgiving day itself, thinking that being a holiday, and before the all-important Thanksgiving Dinner time, I would be a shoe-in for a credit scenario; frankly, I didn’t want to make the trip in the first place, and I figured if there was ever a chance I would get to reach for the stars and take a shot at one of my travel fantasies, this would be the opportunity.

However, it’s apparent that the maniacal traveling is done the day before, or the Sunday before, and when it comes to Thanksgiving Day itself, fuck, I could’ve stood-by for the flight and made it on the flight, it was so desolate, but instead, I was the schmuck who paid for a full fare, thinking it would be oversold, I could forfeit my seat, get $500, and be absolved of having to travel up for a holiday.

All the times mythical wife and I have traveled internationally, we’ve always talked about what we’d do if the opportunity ever presented itself, but usually one or both of us were working too stringent of jobs to risk missing, especially since remote work never really existed for our lines of business until COVID, or we had to be cognizant of animal care, or some other reason, so we never really had a serious shot at cashing in on this ourselves.

And now that we have kids, this dream is basically non-existent anymore, unless the kids were already with other family, they weren’t burnt out yet, and were demanding that we tried for it, which I don’t imagine is going to be happening any time soon seeing as how we travel on airplanes maybe twice a year, if even that.

But yeah, I’m so jelly of this girl for what she was able to accomplish.  Not that I’m particularly a fan of American Airlines, but I would gladly take their money if they were offering it up in $1,200 increments to forfeit my seat, and feed and house me.  If I were in her situation, I would do the exact same thing, and be at the airport praying for another oversold notice, and be jumping up and down raising my hand to be the people to continuously volunteer to give up my seat.  I can only try to not be in denial of how much I’d like to live vicariously through her freedom and independence in these circumstances, and the amount of free travel she’ll be able to eke out of $3,550.

Good riddance, Pearl

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TIL: the Atlanta Braves will be moving their Double-A minor league affiliate from Pearl, Mississippi to Columbus, Georgia.  They will also be ditching the Braves moniker and will hopefully be something chintzy and marketable

Not that I pay attention to every iota of Braves coverage as I once did at a point in my life, but as a fan of minor league baseball, and for lack of a better term, a fan of the Atlanta Braves, news like this piques my interest, even if this were reported way the fuck back in January of this year.

I mean, I knew that the Braves had relinquished control over all of their minor league squads back in 2021 like selling their debts, and I didn’t hate the news at all quite the contrary, because I felt that it opened the door for Braves affiliates to spread their wings and try to be something more in the spirit of minor league baseball, instead of the boring, stuffy and sterile branding of “The Braves.”

Gwinnett (AAA) had already switched over to becoming the Strippers Stripers, and Rome (A+) as of this years ditched being the Braves and became The Emperors, as in Roman emperor, and better yet, adopted emperor penguins to be their team’s mascot.  Not that I’ve been paying any attention, but for whatever reason, the Mississippi Braves had remained as such over the last two-plus seasons, and despite their freedom to do so, they didn’t appear to be in any rush to make any changes to the organization.

Until this season apparently, as it was announced that the club will be moving out of Pearl, Mississippi and moving to Columbus, Georgia, as well as ditching the Braves moniker and will be adopting a new name for the start of the 2025 minor league season.

At first blush, my thought was, oh great here we go again with a brand new fucking ballpark to build, but it turns out that there’s apparently a historic ballpark in Columbus, Golden Park, that will actually be renovated and used to house the future Columbus Braves affiliate, instead of building something from scratch.  Granted, a renovation isn’t cheap either, and I’m sure it will probably be something of a $65M tax burden for the people of Columbus to absorb, but that sure beats the $126M it took to build the Braves’ Spring Training facility from scratch in Sarasota.

Regardless of the financial burden of accommodations, this is actually a change that I don’t immediately just want to shit on upon hearing about it.  Having been to Pearl, Mississippi, solely to watch a M-Braves game, I have to say that getting the fuck out of that shithole in the middle of goddamn nowhere is nothing but good news for the Braves and frankly, all of Minor League Baseball in that nobody again will ever have to step foot in Pearl/Jackson, Mississippi after the 2024 season.

It’s the only place I’ve ever been to where I genuinely felt like I was whisked back in time at the casual ignorant racism that got in just a singular afternoon in town, from the moment I left the airport, to getting to the ballpark, and while simply getting food.  The cabbie who picked me up from the airport thought that I had to have been an actual player since I was headed to the ballpark, and upon arriving at the ballpark, I caught some kids staring at me and thinking I was Hideki Matsui.

It’s clear that Asian people aren’t a common occurrence in this chunk of the country, but god damn.  During the game, I was puckish so I went up to a concession stand where there were unsurprisingly chicken tenders and fries, and when I handed over my debit card to pay, the lady at the register examined my card and put down her bifocals, and then said to me, “oh that’s an easy one.”

Obviously having no fucking clue to what she was talking about, I asked her what, and she responded that it was my name, that it was one of those names that wasn’t too hard to pronounce.  Okay then

So needless to say, it seems like a monumental win for any person or any business or in this case, any team, to get the fuck out of Pearl, Mississippi, and head closer to somewhere that’s closer to their parent organization.  Columbus isn’t a tremendous step up from Pearl as far as not feeling like you’re in the middle of nowhere, but at least it’s a military town where people have had some etiquette and discipline beaten into them, and it’s only like a 2-3 hour drive to the Metro Atlanta area if anyone wants to feel some actual civilization.

I’m excited to eventually find out what the team will lean towards as far as a new team name, branding and identity will be.  I don’t know much about Columbus other than it being a military town, so I can’t take any snarky takes or come up with any sarcastic names to anoint them as, but hopefully the yokels out there will have the wherewithal to steer clear of the low-hanging fruit of Christopher, whom we all with brains have heard wasn’t exactly the best guy in history.

But hey, there’s always the Columbus Barves, wouldn’t that be some shit, to take the popularized typo-meme-unofficial sarcasm name for whenever the team fucks up, and make it official?  A guy can dream.

I hope Southwest is ready to be mediocre

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WaPo: Southwest Airlines eliminating open seating starting in 2025

In the grand spectrum of things, Southwest Airlines getting rid of open seating doesn’t really impact my life that much.  I don’t fly enough anymore to really be affected by this, because my life is too hectic at this juncture in my life and when it’s time for a family trip, driving is more economical and logical albeit more time consuming, but it’s better than dropping $2,100 on a trip to like Orlando.

But Southwest was always a company that I had some admiration for, because their general people-first modus operandi was always refreshing in the vast ocean of big businesses that existed solely to part dollars from the hands of the people and put them into the pockets of soulless shitheads known as investors and other finance-ey words used to describe old white people. 

And it’s not like they were starving by any stretch of the imagination, even during some of the most brutal recessions and stretches of financial wastelands, SWA was one of the few airlines that continually turned profits, mostly on account of their generally friendly business practices.

Reasonable fares, convenient routes, free checked bags, and free change policies; there was a lot to like about SWA, but if there was ever one thing that conversely blew the minds off of the dull-watted, and to some probably perceived as a deterrent and turn-off, was the open-seating policy that probably defeated more people than the internet itself.

Personally, it was, and has never been an issue for me, because I have a brain.  It’s not that hard to queue up in lines in little chunks of five behind clearly marked totems, and it takes either a little bit of upfront discipline or the willingness to pay a little extra to get Group A boarding, and seeing as how the vast majority of my travels on SWA have usually been by myself, I’ve almost always been able to grab an errant single aisle or window seat closer to the front of the aircraft, meaning I can get the fuck off sooner rather than later being wedged into the back of the aircraft and needing an extra 20 minutes just to deplane.

But if I had to guess, in spite of being their policy for over the last 50 years, SWA has simply had enough of the bullshit of dealing with passengers who just haven’t gotten it after a half century, passengers who conduct themselves like entitled spoiled assholes on the aircraft, and having to deal with passengers who they have to reimburse or give free second seats to because they’re the sizes of Pontiac Azteks.

Like the vast majority of things in the world that end up being declared ruined, there’s nobody really to blame, except people.

Sure, at the root of it, I want to accuse some managerial change at the higher rungs of the ladders at SWA, where some bean counters have identified a vast field of earning opportunities to be had by ditching open seating, and that’s probably not inaccurate, but the company had resisted many opportunities to switch in previous decades, but in this day and age, the bullshit of passengers has probably grown too much, their workforce has grown flakier and full of impatient younger heads, and enough is enough and this is where we’re headed.

The reality is that SWA has probably lost out on millions over the last few decades, by trying to be The People’s™ airline, with their friendly policies and acceptance and inclusion, and thanks to mounting passenger bullshit, they’ve probably just hit a philosophical wall of why they should be handicapping their earning capabilities being nice to a ton of assholes, when absolutely nobody else is doing it?

When the day is over, as I said, it doesn’t impact me a whole hell of a lot, but I would be curious to see what lies in the future for Southwest.  I don’t imagine the loss of open-seating is really going to impact the airline as much as many outlets on the internet make it sound like it’s going to, but for those people who were married to the concept, and are going to revolt, or at least no longer prioritize them because they’re basically transforming into an “ordinary” airline on the level of United or American or JetBlue, SWA is just going to likely blend into the pack, except, barring a change, more handicapped by virtue of not partnering up with travel aggregators like Google, Kayak, Travelocity and Expedia.

Their free baggage and lack of change fees might be enough to retain some customers, and I’m really curious to know what’s going to become of the large passenger policy once seats become assigned, and big people won’t be able to just lumber to the gate and assume an empty seat will be available next to theirs, but in the game of airline thrones, the most important thing is solely going to hinge on if as long as SWA can remain competitive with fares.

Regardless, I still lament over the days before SWA engulfed AirTran.  Not a travel day goes by where I don’t miss AirTran and the time where I could get sub-$200 RT fares to visit my family and eastern-based friends, and then cash in my credits to trips to Las Vegas or Seattle.  After the merger, all those routes have nearly doubled in cost, and despite my general positive opinion of their brand, I was not happy about it.

Things change, this is where we’re headed, and I hope SWA is ready to slide into the middle of the pack.  But as long as they don’t have to see any further videos and articles about their passengers being douchebag pricks on the internet, they probably are happy to take that deal in the long game.

Does nobody move for ‘excuse me’ anymore?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During my last family trip, I observed a noticeable amount of instances where saying ‘excuse me’ to people, resulted in absolutely no response at all.  And it’s not like I’m taking any off-path routes to get from point A to B to C, I’m talking about very general, public and heavy-traffic walkways or paths, where people clog up traffic, I want to get around them, and they have the space to move elsewhere, but for whatever selfish reason, they exist in the way.

I say excuse me, in a normal, neutral tone, and in some instances, people glanced over at me, and in other either people pretended like they couldn’t hear me, or proceeded to completely no-sell the fuck out of me.  It’s at this point, I say excuse me in a louder, more insistent tone and this usually does the trick to get them to acknowledge my existence, and when I usually just proceed to move at them, will they actually move.

It’s not like I was walking by myself in most cases, and could just as alternatively take longer, wider routes to avoid being close to people in the first place.  In most of these cases, I’m wheeling a stroller, luggage, or, in a rush carrying a toddler that needs to go to the bathroom, but for whatever reason it is, it just felt like a conspicuously high number of instances where it just seems like people have dropped common courtesy of moving the fuck out of the way when people say excuse me.

And when I have to repeat myself, louder and more hostile sounding, all these cocksuckers look at me like I’m the asshole for trying to get somewhere, where they’re the conceited selfish shitheads blocking walkways and thinking their inane conversations or needs are higher priority than others.

It’s not lost on me that this is sounding like an old man yelling at the sky kind of rant, but what’s really wrong with hoping that people have common decency to continue honoring the simple and basic human interaction of moving out of the way when someone says excuse me?  It’s not like I’m barreling through with the intention of initiating contact and shoving people out of the way, I’m simply alerting people that I need to get around them, and to pardon any potential contact and give them a heads up to move if they can.  Fuck me, right??

The Holiday Famiry Road Trip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In an attempt to tackle numerous birds with a single stone, my entire house packed up and hit the road, so that we could visit family, see some sights, and let the kids and the au pair see some things outside of our everyday life in Georgia.  All of the driving necessary to hit all of our destinations was daunting, but with hopes that breaking up the trip with strategic stops, and having an iPad full of kids’ movies and television shows to distract, it wasn’t really that bad aside from the sheer time and boredom of the driving aspect which is I guess the burden of dads everywhere in the world when it comes to a famiry road trip, but honestly I can’t complain.  The kids were great on the entire long stretches of driving, and we didn’t have to stop nearly as often as I feared we might have.

As for the trip itself, it was pretty good from the standpoint of getting to see a lot of family, and taking the kids and au pair into Washington DC to see some sights.  Say what I might about DC as a former resident of the area, but places like their zoo and all the museums truly are top-notch.  And the gentrification fairy certainly has done some work to the place since the last time I really went exploring or got lost in the city itself.

Pour one out for the husk that used to be Chinatown, which is apparently limited to like two restaurants and the big red arch that remains.  It’s also hilarious to see all the American and chain businesses that seem like they’re required to have Chinese writing on their storefronts, so like you’re seeing a Chipotle, with Chinese characters that probably say like Mexican food or something on it, since I doubt there’s specific characters to describe a burrito.

I took our au pair to a Caps game since somehow she’s inexplicably a hockey fan from South America and is apparently a New York Islanders fan, and since they were playing the Caps during our trip, it seemed like a layup to be able to gift something of a dream experience for her to be able to see the Islanders in person.  Unfortunately, the Islanders took the L, but she got to witness the general apathy and low-excitement of the DC sports scene, where the entire crowd basically waiting for Alexander Ovechkin to do something, and the guy looking like he’s playing hurt, based on the Undertaker-way he was coming into the game only at optimal scoring chances, and shooting from the same spot on the ice a few times before coming right back off.

In the past, I used to hold onto something of a kinship with the general area, and have a sense of pride of being a former Virginian.  I liked knowing that I still knew the area very well and could get around without a map, take Metro without needing guidance, and generally co-exist with the denizens of the area without much complaint.  But during the span of this trip, there were several instances of where I came to the realization that I’m just not one of them anymore, and not just that, that I don’t really like it up there very much, and often wondered how I was able to live up there for like 12 years.

People, in all of the DMV, are just so much more conceited and petty and just generally more selfish than what I’m used to living in the South.  It’s hard to explain, but there’s always the smallest of micro-aggressions that I witness that remind me that I’m not in the South anymore, whether it’s holding doors open, being in the way on sidewalks or being at restaurants and being completely unwilling to offer up extra chairs or space.  Like we’re at a restaurant with six people, and there are only 4-tops left, but both adjacent tables have people with extra chairs; perhaps it was presumptuous to assume anyone would’ve offered them up to my party, but down South, people are just a little friendlier and a little more aware of others, as opposed to the people around us who insisted their coats or their empty bag of takeout needed their extra chairs.

Mythical wife actually wants to ultimately end up back there, as she has lots of friends up in Maryland, but I have very little desire to move back up there, even if 75% of my general family lives up there.  It’s not like they’d all automatically become ready babysitters, nor would I want to put that responsibility onto all of my cousins or my parents, and then I’d be stuck up in DMV paying DMV land values and being subject to all the shitty people and worst of all, the motherfucking traffic.

Because that was absolutely one of the worst parts of the trips, was the aforementioned motherfucking traffic.  It was bad when I lived up there with the seemingly endless construction of the I-495/I-395/I-95 interchange, but because VDOT apparently needs to always have a 20-year project on their docket at all times in order to justify their existence, they’ve decided to turn I-495/I-66/Rt. 123 into their personal battlefield now, and getting stuck on a route in which I remember cruising back and forth through in the past just made me feel homicidal whenever I was caught in some standstill traffic.

In fact, while up in DMV, there was literally not a single instance where I got into my car and didn’t get stuck in some catastrophic traffic jam.  Going to Gaithersburg, traffic.  Coming back from Gaithersburg, traffic.  Going to my mom’s place, traffic.  Going to the nearest Metro station to pick up wife and au pair, traffic.  After my family gathering, my house was going to head back to Richmond in order to shave an hour off of the big drive the following day, and one of my cousin’s said that I shouldn’t expect any traffic on the night of December 23rd, but naturally, there’s some catastrophic traffic jam in fucking Quantico of all places, as if my time in the DMV area just had to get one last fuck you before I left.

People seem to think Atlanta traffic is, which it is, but I still think traffic up there is still way worse.  Atlanta traffic is primarily aggressive drivers and poor infrastructure, but the DMV area has infrastructure and a reliable train system.  Their traffic is on account of bad drivers who are all pussy-whipped into overly-safe-into-becoming-dangerous drivers by the Commonwealth’s egregious ticket fines and the area’s constant tampering with the road system buoyed by their $4B+ road budget.  The overall result is me wanting to blow my brains out every time I got into the car, and most definitely not wanting to be in the area, as a residence especially.

But like I said, this trip was not entirely about me.  It’s important that my kids meet and have exposure to my family, and it’s important that our au pair gets to actually travel and see places and experience things outside of her daily routines, so if it means accomplishing those things, I’ll take some traffic on the chin for the greater good.  As much as I bemoaned the traffic and aggravations of DMV living, seeing how happy my kids are around their grandparents and extended family, and seeing how happy the au pair was when she got to see her favorite Islander players in person, I really can’t ask for better gifts than those.  This is why I often insist on getting nothing for the holidays, because some of the best things just aren’t tangible things.

The work trip, fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
I also want to point out that I used AI regenerative fill to AI the people in the background the fuck out of this selfie

So I’m on the red-eye flight back to Atlanta now, and I’m telling myself to write something, before I go into zombie mode and watch Castlevania or the Mandalorian on my iPad, because once I start, I’ll probably until we touch down.

So Adobe MAX is now in the past, and I can say that it was a pretty good trip, overall. Adobe really put on a flashy and fairly informative conference, and from what I could hear from those who have been to prior years, it was run smoother and had fixed a lot of issues. 

Traveling with some work colleagues was enjoyable and I feel like we’ve gotten a little bit of opportunity to get to know each other a little bit better.  The hotel was nice, and I was the tryhard who brought some gym gear and managed to get in two maintenance workouts while out there.

Best of all, it was all covered by work, so all of my food and the airport transport are expensed, and they naturally picked up the tab on the show admission and the hotel.

Despite being there for some work purposes, I still made a point of carving out some me-time, in the form of wandering around the city and eating some abominations of Mexican food that the internet has been teasing me of their existence for the last year.  Of course, they fell into the parameters of my daily food per diem amount, which only sweetened the pot that I could expense things that I would’ve gladly paid for out of pocket to begin with.

First, I tracked down the quesarito-burrito that I first saw on some rando-Instagram reel that was fed to me for some reason despite being all the fuck away in DTLA.  The best part was going in there and explaining that I wanted something that wasn’t on the menu and that it was something I saw on the internet; and I had to show them their own reel to jog their memory, but it was good enough for them to get me the burrito I had been covering for months.

And it was basically everything I hoped it would be, a California-style burrito, but wrapped in a quesarito instead of an ordinary tortilla.  I could’ve finished it, but in doing so, I could’ve really derailed a large part of my trip, plus I was getting the meat sweats something fierce from just how rich it was, or maybe it was the Reaper sauce that added to it or maybe both, so I tapped when I was like 75% finished.

Next, came the trash can nachos that I had heard about, and became enamored with.  Ordinarily, I’d have tried to go there for dinner, but upon learning that being in DTLA, they operated at downtown hours, so I kind of had to pivot and hit them up for lunch instead.

They were located in what google called the fashion district, but seemed like a giant shopping district for quinceñeras or something.  Regardless, it took a little bit of walking around but I found the place in this quirky small food court loaded with nothing but Mexican and Asian foods.  Again, I had to ask for the trash can nachos as they’re not on the menu, and once again I felt like some secret agent or something asking for some illicit.

Ten minutes later, it was brought out to me in what looked like a coffee can.  Just like I had seen on the internet, the can was pulled up, and pouring out onto the plate was a mountain of chips, guacamole, beans, jalapeños, sauces, more chips, more cheese, and carne asada.  Naturally, it was as good as it looked, and much like with the quesarito-burrito, I opted to throw in the towel instead of forcing myself to finish it.

Between the two internet-found foods, I’m hard pressed to decide on what was better.  The quesarito-burrito is a true novelty item, but the nachos had some insane presentation value.  Frankly, nachos really should only be made and served trashcan style, and if I had to really pick one of the two, I think I’m going with the nachos.

But I suppose I should say something about the conference seeing as how it was what brought me out to the left coast in the first place; again, it was a fun show in the sense of production value, and shine and presentation that went into it.

Continue reading “The work trip, fin” →

The work trip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My job is sending me out to California to attend the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. This is pretty cool because I can’t ever say that I’ve been on a work trip such as this before in my life; the last time I skipped town for a work function, it was to like Macon, Georgia where maybe like 12 people from various other satellite offices could meet my entire office when I worked for the state.

But yeah, work trip to California where they’re paying for the flights and the hotel.  You’d think I’d be more excited for this as it’s at the same time a little bit of a forced break from parenting, but I’m not treating this like it’s going to be the greatest experience of my life or anything.  It’s still a conference full of other graphic designers and creative types, and most of my zero readers probably know I have a bit of an eyeroll-ey contentious feeling towards that demographic.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing it for so long that I think most of the bullshit high-up creatives say is full of shit and made up word fluff, or maybe I’m envious of the next generation of creatives and the talent that they bring to the table or maybe a little of both.  But the idea of being a conference full of these types isn’t necessarily my first preference of people to surround myself with, but that’s also probably me just being a curmudgeon about everything that’s usually the norm.

Honestly, the thing I’m looking forward to the most probably shouldn’t be any surprise, but it’s some of the potential food options I’ve scouted out.  Years of seeing drive-by reels of restaurants that usually anywhere but in Atlanta are now within reach, at least for ones found in downtown Los Angeles, or as the kids say, DTLA.  Yeah, I’ve found a few that are within reasonable distance to where I’m staying at, and as god as my witness, it’s my time to get my hands on shit like hot Cheetos loaded quesaritos, twice-wrapped burritos and trash can nachos.

However this isn’t to say that I’m completely no-selling MAX.  Instead of coasting through the event and scheduling nothing but layup workshops of shit in my wheelhouse, I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to schedule as many workshops and seminars of the things I’m not as versed in, so that I can actually maybe learn some shit and get on the path to some career advancement.

All the same, as a whole I really am looking forward to this trip as I’m nearing embarkation.  It’ll be nice to have a little bit of purely alone time, eat some trash I’ve always wanted to try and maybe I’ll learn something useful.