Heading for London

April 4, 1994

Aboard American Airlines flight 106, somewhere over the Atlantic, bound for London ...

Well, spring vacation is over, and it's back to the grind again. I'm on my way to London for a one-day seminar on software metrics for a bunch of people from the British Ministry of Defense, and then on to Paris for a day at a big Client/Server computer conference before returning home on Thursday. Meanwhile, my sons return to school after a two-week break; my daughter returns to work on Wall Street after her first three-day weekend of 1994; and my wife snaps back into her role school-organizer/chauffeaur/errand-runner/super-Mom.

We spent most of last week on the Big Island of Hawaii on the way home from Hong Kong. What a place! We were there about four years ago, and toured the south end of the island to see the volcanoes; this time, we were at a hotel near the north end of the island, which has an entirely different landscape. If you've been thinking, as I did, that all the Hawaiian islands are little bumps in the ocean, here's an interesting fact: the big island is almost exactly the same size as the state of Connecticut. Yet it has only 125,000 people, of whom nearly 90,000 are clustered in three towns of Hilo, Kona, and something-or-other. So most of the state is nearly empty, and the terrain in much of the northern end looks like the vistas of the western states -- vast rolling vistas, hills, and peaks.

Peaks? Well, yes, there are mountains -- the mountains created by the volcanoes. One of them is high enough that there was a heavy mantle of snow at the top when we arrived last week; the two biggest mountains are 8,000 feet and 13,000 feet, though it seems impossible to imagine anything as high as 13,000 feet in the middle of a tropical paradise. Another interesting fact: some parts of the island get an average of 2 inches of rain per year, while other parts get 300 inches per year.

All of this was lost upon the kids, who spent as much time as humanly possible down on the beach, soaking up the sunshine and riding the waves on a boogie-board. I was intending to take a helicopter ride to see the volcanoes from on high, but someone told us that there had been a helicopter accident a couple of weeks ago -- so that was the end of that ... I'll have to save it for another trip. I did manage to go out for a drive one afternoon, and saw some wonderful countryside; interspersed with the arid, rugged terrain on one side of the mountains were lush, green meadows populated by sheep, cattle, and even a couple of llamas ...

It all came to an end too soon. We flew home the day before Good Friday -- through Honolulu, and then onto a Northwest red-eye to Minneapolis, and then another jump to New York. By the time we landed, we were all completely disoriented, and we still haven't adjusted properly: everyone went to sleep at a reasonable hour Sunday night, but then woke up at 2:30 in the morning. The rest of the family fell asleep again around 4AM, but I ended up staying up the rest of the night, catching up on e-mail correspondence and various other computer chores ...

In fact, I got enough work done that I think I can spare a couple of hours now for a nap. The flight attendants have just finished serving a lackluster breakfast, and I think they're going to leave everyone alone for the next couple of hours. I've had the obligatory polite chat with the fellow sitting next to me (he's now busily typing e-mail messages on his IBM ThinkPad while I type this note), I think I've just about run out of steam ...