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  • Hamburg – Window Restrictors

    I’m at my luxury hotel in Hamburg, well, the Ibis Budget which isn’t really luxury, but I can dream. I’m on the fifth floor and I’m delighted to see that the window opens fully and isn’t restricted. I don’t like how hotel rooms in the UK, and it is normally the UK, are either hermetically sealed or allow their windows to open about 2 centimetres. It hardly allows the air to cascade in to keep the room cool.

    I take the view that most adults tend not to fall out of windows, and that it’s ridiculous to try and stop them if they want to. I can see the need for families to want windows that don’t open to prevent children from trying to escape, but in that case, put them on the ground floor and restrict those rooms. So I’m guessing here that the EU hasn’t put some ridiculous law on hotels to force them to restrict windows, primarily since I’ve rarely seen a hotel which has them. But in the UK, the HSE seem to have demanded that hotels ensure no-one can possibly fall out of the window….

    I think I’m with the mainland Europeans on this. Let there be air.

  • British Airways – BOAC Retro Livery

    To mark the one hundredth anniversary of British Airways, the company has been repainting some of their aircraft. The one hundredth anniversary is a bit loosely defined since BA have been formed of some many component parts over the decades, but it’s an important event for them.

    I didn’t think that I’d see any of the aircraft, but currently parked outside of Heathrow T5 B Gates is G-BYGC which has been painted in the BOAC livery which was in use from between 1964 and 1974. It’s a bold design and I really like the retro look of the aircraft, which seems to have received a great deal of publicity.

    Incidentally, it looks like the aircraft is shortly flying to Philadelphia in the United States, now one of my favourite cities since my visit a few weeks ago.

  • British Airways – Reward Flight Saver

    My travels, and also credit card spend, means that I’ve collected a fair chunk of Avios points. There are numerous ways of using these, and I usually just use them for discounts on flights.

    However, British Airways also have a Reward Flight Saver (RFS) scheme which means that for a fixed charge and some Avios, numerous short haul destinations are available. The prices aren’t unreasonable, so for my trip to Hamburg today there is a charge of 8,000 Avios and £35. Depending how you value Avios this isn’t necessarily the cheapest solution, but it suits my needs.

    As an example of what customers can get, a return to Amsterdam is £35 and 8,000 points, as is Paris. Destinations such as Rome, Barcelona and Venice are all also £35, but there’s a charge of 13,000 Avios for the return flight. Most off-peak flights have availability for these fares, which are all in economy.

    One of the downsides is that there are no Avios points granted for the flight and also no tier points. However, since I have enough Avios and I’m nowhere near reaching enough tier points for Gold, this isn’t much of a concern.

  • Isle of Wight Trip – Day 4 (Old St. Helen’s Church on the Duver)

    This was an interesting sight, the old St. Helen’s Church of which now only the tower remains. There has been a church here since the early eighth century, although the original wooden building was destroyed during a Danish raid in 998.

    The new stone church was built in the early twelfth century and the tower was added in the thirteenth century. The church was used by the Benedictines, but it started to fall out of use in the early fifteenth century and well before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

    The church came into the ownership of Eton College in 1440 and they owned it until 1799, but they didn’t bother to maintain it. This meant that chunks of it fell down and the locals pinched the stone. Other pieces of the stone, namely the sandstone, were taken by sailors who used the holy stones to scour and whiten the decks.

    After a while of the stones being pinched the decision was made to demolish what was left, other than the tower. The tower was instead painted white, which it remains today, by the British Navy in 1719 and used as a navigational aid. A new church was built inland in the eighteenth century and was also given the dedication of St. Helen’s.

    Today the church remains bricked up and the entrances are sealed with iron grilles to prevent any access. It’s easily noticeable along the coastline and at least the tower has remained for future generations.

     

  • Aerochk Concept

    I like this concept, which is replacing the traditional security set-up with an escalator which performs the same service.

    The Aerochk press release says:

    “When travelers arrive at the airport, rather than waiting in a separate security line, they would just walk towards the nearest Aerochk on their way to their boarding gate. Passengers would place their passport on the left side of the machine and their luggage on the right. Allowing passport , the traveller and his luggage to be checked simultaneously.”

    Now, this concept seems marvellous, but having gone through airport security hundreds of times the best systems get delays because of confused passengers.

    Passengers who don’t remove trays so that the system gets clogged up, passengers taking two litre bottles of water through security and those who forget you can’t take knives.

    I can just imagine how the system would get backed up and passengers who would try to walk down the escalator. But I still like it, I think my need for constant movement would be satisfied with a system like this.

    It’s just a concept though and I can’t imagine it’ll be introduced, but it’s a reminder of how clunky the current separate systems of baggage, security and border protection actually are.

  • Isle of Wight Trip – Day 6 (Tram Line on Ryde Pier)

    There are three parallel structures which run to the end of Ryde Pier, one takes the railway, another takes the road and pedestrian walkway and the final one is the remains of the old tram line. Some of the tram line structure was demolished when the service fell out of use, although it has been used as a temporary walkway when the main walkway needed to be restored.

    The tramway, as indicated above, ran along the pier from 29 August 1864 until 26 January 1969. Initially the tram was powered by horses, then steam and then finally it was transferred to an electric system. The tram was designed to maximise capacity and there was a driver’s carriage at only one end, meaning it had to be reversed back along the line.

    Although one of the tram carriages was kept after the service ended, the storage conditions were poor and it’s in quite a state. The island’s steam railway has a project to bring the carriage back into use, but as they note, the carriage was designed to maximise capacity and not comfort, making it a problem for today’s health and safety requirements.

    Although the tram carriage itself is likely to be brought back into use once it’s restored, there are no plans to reinstate the former track along the pier. The condition of this is poor and I can only begin to imagine how much it would cost to bring it back into use. However, at least there is a train service in operation, so there remains a public transport option on what must be one of the few trains to operate along a pier in Europe.

  • Isle of Wight Trip – Day 4 (More Photos)

    More photos from day 4 of the Isle of Wight adventure.

  • Isle of Wight Trip – Day 5 (More Photos)

    And photos from day five of our walking expedition around the Isle of Wight.

  • Isle of Wight Trip – Day 6 (More Photos)

    And some more photos from day six of our walking around the Isle of Wight adventure.

  • Isle of Wight Trip – Day 6 (Cowes Floating Bridge)

    I don’t think that I’ve been on a chain ferry before, even though there is apparently one at Reedham. This service runs between East Cowes and West Cowes, with the journey time being just a couple of minutes.

    The information board showing the current list of charges to cross the River Medina on the ferry. There’s a ticket machine to buy tickets, although there’s also a ticket inspector who can sell tickets and they accept cash or cards. There’s no option to buy just a single ticket, as they’re sold as returns.

    The ferry after all of the cars and pedestrians had crossed. We got on at this point to travel from East Cowes to West Cowes. There was a rowing boat service offered between the two towns from the early eighteenth century until 1859, when a steamboat service was introduced.

    The current chain ferry is the sixth one to ply the waters, with the fifth one being withdrawn from service in January 2017 after forty years of service. The new ferry operates from around 05:00 until just after 00:00 and it carries around 1.5 million pedestrians per year and around 400,000 vehicles.

    Looking at a newspaper article from 1930 there were 1.4 million pedestrian crossings, so the number of people needing to use the service hasn’t changed. As there are no other crossings over the River Medina, the alternative is to go down via Newport, which adds around thirty minutes to a car journey.

    There’s a pedestrian area on two levels as well as the facility to carry twenty cars. There’s some seating available, although since the journey is so short, there are no other facilities.

    The ferry landing in West Cowes. We took this ferry as part of our coastal walk around the Isle of Wight, so it presented an interesting and intriguing way to end our walk back into West Cowes from where we had started.