wormulon.net

The moment you see a scorpion shell in a spider web you know two things: a) there are scorpions around and b) the spiders are no jokes either.



I should mention that the web was about 5 feet high in the air.

I made it back to Chicago and will be headed home this evening. In the meantime I'll restock on candy etc

Tikal (Guatemala) was incredible. It was supposed to be crowded but I found myself walking around for an hour without seeing anyone.



More to come once I am able to process 100s of pictures and have spare cycles to scale them down.

During my travel through Asia I've seen myself behind multiple NATs from time to time. This is what my internet connection in Flores looks like:

root@phobos:~ > traceroute 123.org
traceroute to 123.org (78.47.108.130), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.2.1 (192.168.2.1) 3 ms 3 ms 2 ms
2 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 5 ms 3 ms 3 ms
3 gw.tikalnetmayaland.net (172.16.10.1) 8 ms 5 ms 5 ms
4 ip-cust10193.telefonica-ca.net (216.184.127.193) 21 ms 5 ms 7 ms
5 192.168.241.241 (192.168.241.241) 14 ms 12 ms 12 ms
6 ip-rip04113.telefonica-ca.net (66.119.95.113) 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms
7 66.201.183.229 (66.201.183.229) 12 ms 13 ms 12 ms
8 So-3-1-1-0-grtmiabr2.red.telefonica-wholesale.net (84.16.9.113) 36 ms 34 ms 35 ms
9 So7-0-3-0-grtmiabr3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net (213.140.38.166) 34 ms 34 ms 34 ms
...

Now that is at least two NATs but it works quite well ... and amazingly fast at up to 40kB/s.

I've been quite lazy throughout this vacation when it comes to posting more than pictures.
The day before yesterday I did a daylong trip to the North Shore of O'ahu. On the way I stopped at the Honolulu Hardrock Cafe for a shirt and then once more at the Dole Pineapple plantation. I did not intend to spend time at the plantation but as I had the time ...
The whole tour thing at Dole is a better joke ... a 20 minute narrated train ride where everything including warnings comes from a tape. Well at least I now know what pineapples look like in their different stages.

North Shore was fun although there were hardly any waves to watch surfers. Still one could get the totally different atmosphere. What VW minivans are in Kiel appear to be cheap pickup trucks with overly large tires around there.

At night (11PM) I boarded a First Class flight to Phoenix. From there I was connecting on various flights to eventually end up in Chicago. Instead of spending money for a short hotel stay I booked myself a scenic route through Baltimore airport. When I arrived in Chicago my luggage unfortunately was still in Baltimore. It took the US Airways people two attempts and the better part of an hour to sort things out and send it off to meet me on my Charlotte to Guatemala City flight the next day.

The flight to Guatemala took us over Tampa, Fl which was nice to see again. I could make out a few places that I remember, esp. Sanibel Island in the South. From Tampa it was a direct flight across the Yucatan peninsula to Guatemala City. I could even see Flores on the way. Unfortunately clouds prevented me from getting clean shots with my small camera.

Arriving in Guatemala I had to hope that my luggage would eventually show up ... and it did. Nobody here seems to care about the Priority tags on the luggage, though. In Chicago on the other hand my luggage was the first piece to arrive thanks to the red Priority tag.

What got my attention at first was the 10 Euro Playstation clone but then I got closer and found the label Educational Computer on the keyboard. Note that the keyboard has Windows keys I'm not sure what the gun has to do with education but than that might be due to the surroundings here.

Three chicken tortillas with asorted veggies and some not so spicy sauce. Let's see what my stomach has to say to this tomorrow

If you are in Chicago having a deep dish pizza is a moral imperative. Last time I've been to Gino's East and Due. I remember Gino's was good and went there again, although alone this time. I opted for the smallest pizza which was still more than enough.

Finally I made it ... but my luggage isn't with me yet. It actually was on the flights that I was scheduled on.

I had time to go the Hardrock Cafe in Phoenix yesterday:

I'm still in Phoenix. I was delayed, rebooked and now my connecting flight is once more delayed for three hours. I'll hopefully leave Phoenix by the time I was supposed to be in Hawaii. The only upside is that I had time to go downtown and tick yet another Hardrock Cafe off my list.
Basically I'm still a lucky camper as I'm flying First Class. Another First Class customer was bumped off his seat so I can get on but spending half a day in transit sucks big time. I'll get in touch with US Airways to get this mess cleaned up.

My first Chicago layover during this trip could be considered short but I've seen a lot ... I was back at the airport around 2:30AM and due to the jetlag was well awake. I started chatting with the bus driver who took me from Hertz to the terminal. It turned out that he is learning German and we spent a couple terminal-to-Hertz round trips chatting away.
I checked in early for my flights only to notice that I am not able to check my luggage through. US Airways cannot put more than three legs on a luggage tag. The initial flight to Charlotte will be on a small Embraer plane that currently gets pushed around the airport due to computer problems. The gate on my boarding pass was F12 but it got moved to E7. Now the computer at E7 is printing the manifest but the gate itself is blocked by another plane. So off I am to gate E3 to catch a bus to the plane ...
Hopefully the First Class Flight to Maui will be better than this

Chicago .. it's been a few years. The inaugural flight DUS-ORD on Lufthansa was nothing special. They only reminded customers by offering hot finger food, sandwiches and some of that bubbly at the gate accompanied by some life music.
I actually arrived almost 40 minutes early and thus my rental at Hertz wasn't ready yet. I got a current Ford Mustang for cheap thanks to my &1 Gold VIP whatever status
While driving on I-90 east towards The Loop I remembered a few corners that I drove along about five years ago. Chicago is beautiful although it looks much like a construction site in some regions. The flair thanks to the raised metro and Chicago river is something special.