Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Writer's Notebook: A Trip to London Town

In January, business trips took me around the world.  Over the next week or so, I'll do a series of posts on the trips and the places I saw. 

First stop, London.  I'd come down with a cold over the weekend, so I dreaded having to fly under those conditions.  My strategy: take decongestants, drink lots of water and hope for the best.  I had an aisle seat and we flew during the day.  Happily, the nasty headaches and ear pressure I've sometimes experienced under these circumstances never materialized.  A van met our group at the airport, but one of our colleagues came in on a different flight to another terminal.  That added an hour to our trip -- Heathrow is huge and the best way to get around between terminals is by train.   We finally got into London at about 12:00 midnight and heard about the tragic Haiti earthquake just as we landed.  Much of the gang went out to drink, but I repaired to my room, nursed my cold and got a few hours sleep. 

I woke up the next morning and it looked like this.  Snow had fallen overnight and the inclement weather limited the visibility in our location on the Thames by the Tower Bridge.   

 

The local people told us that it had been snowing a great deal in the prior few days; we were just catching the tail end of it. 

Our meetings kept us busy during the day.  The first evening, our group went out to a medieval dinner experience.  We checked our coats and then were given outfits to wear right out of the middle ages.  In the spirit of things, I decided to try the beer, but whatever they were serving was godawful -- it tasted liked it had been sitting in barrels for ages and had gone rancid.  Nonetheless, we had a fun evening.  We were instructed in the proper behavior for guests in that era.  Whenever the King suggested a toast, we were to yell out: Wasail!  We practiced and got very good at this, though it failed to improve the taste of the beer.   We all sat down at long metal tables and were served community style.  When it was time for the next course of food, we made the requests by banging our fists on the tables.  We also adapted to this very quickly.  

In between rounds of food -- a murky soup served without benefit of spoons and hunks of chicken -- the court jesters did juggling tricks and the merry wenches danced with curtsies and displays of petticoats.  Bottom line:  a medieval banquet is a fair excuse to serve bland food and copious amounts of cheap alcohol, but the theatrical aspect of the evening sticks with you the longest. 

London is often foggy and we never did see the sun in our time there.  Here's another view looking out from the hotel across the river. 

Our meeting continued the next day and I managed to get all of my presentations done despite my sore throat. In fact, I had begun to recover from the cold.  That evening, we ate in at the hotel and this time the food was much better.   The salads were fresh and the main dishes offered real taste.  The wine also flowed in ample quantities, keeping spirits upright.  Afterwards, we engaged in a Nintendo WII driving competition.  I was not overly concerned when my vehicle spun out and went in the wrong direction, allowing me to head back to the room before midnight. 

The next morning, we had a fine buffet breakfast -- the breakfasts were consistently good throughout our stay -- as the combination of coffee, orange juice, smoked salmon and fresh fruit prepared me for the day ahead.  On this day, we had a customer meeting, but it was in walking distance, so we finally got to leave the hotel again.  We were in the financial district, which is not nearly as robust as it was before the financial crash, but managed to be quite lively on this morning.  After sitting in meetings for two days, the walk was refreshing. 

The meeting went reasonably well, and then we retraced our steps back to the hotel.  Our contingent was getting ready to leave, but we got to say our goodbyes over a light lunch.  By now, the weather had improved somewhat, but clouds still dominated the sky. 

Our route back entailed travel via the underground and by train.  We walked past the Tower of London, which looked very different than it had during my tourist visit during the Eighties.  Visitors now enter via a modern glass pavilion, analogous to the experience one has across the channel when visiting the Louvre in Paris.   New buildings, construction and the much older structures of the Tower collided visually as we walked by enroute to our station. 

In the station itself, we encountered the new phenomenon of the electronic ticket kiosques which fail to accept American credit cards, since most Euro cards now include a validation chip.  Our US bankers, showing off their wonderful sense of customer service, don't see the problem.  Right.  Why am I so surprised?  

Anyway, the regular ticket takers still accepted old school credit cards, so one of our group bought tickets for the underground for all of us.  We headed downstairs to board the Circle Line train headed for Paddington Station.  We no sooner got downstairs than an announcement from the speakers blared a message that the Circle Line train would not be running on the weekend.  After several other trains came by and there was no sign of the Circle Line, we wondered if the weekend had already begun in this fair land at 2:30 on Friday afternoon.  After about 25 minutes, the Circle Line train finally did arrive -- sorry folks, a few more hours before the weekend really starts -- and we boarded. 

I took a seat and watched the ebb and fro as young men and women wearing various colorful styles took their seats, chatted or got buried in books or MP3 players.  About thirty minutes later, we arrived at Paddington and ascended stairs and escalators into the main station. 

In my view, the best way to get to the airport is via the Heathrow Express, a high speed train that runs throughout the day and takes passengers all the way out to Heathrow -- a one hour car ride -- in just fifteen minutes.  We bought tickets and got onto a waiting train.  The train had plenty of room, so we just put our big bags aside and then settled into comfortable leather seats.  A while later, a blonde haired woman took the seat next to me and I admired the fine cut of her black dress while she talked non-stop with a somewhat older man who appeared to be her signifigant other. 

The train started up and soon we were whooshing through the suburbs outside of London at speeds up to 250 kilometers per hour.  The train entered a tunnel and we got off at the first airport stop.  The entire journey took fifteen minutes as promised.  

The rest of the trip was uneventful, merely a jet ride home to the Boston area after a week in London.  Alas, I was destined to return to this same airport within a week enroute to Singapore, but that's a tale for another day. 

Writer's Notebook: Writing on the Road

I'm sitting in an airport and getting ready to take my third trip by air this month.  This one is the long one -- by the time I finish the two legs, I'll be on the other side of the world. 

Travelling that much and that far is mostly an endurance contest, but it's also a time of long hours without distraction.  In other words, these long airplane trips are an excellent place to write with minimal disruption. In my case, I've done plenty of business writing on a plane, but sometimes also have the time for personal writing, particularly when I'm travelling at off hours such as on the weekend. 

As regular readers of this blog know, I've written one novel and am more than halfway through the second one. I'd estimate that half or more of these words were originally composed on either a personal or business trip, with much of the writing done on airplane trips. My current approach is to write using a wirebound, hard copy notebook.  The three subject binders targeted to college students work well.  

You may be thinking -- oh, how primitive -- writing with pen and paper.  Truth is, I've written a lot directly on the computer as well, and that works well, but it is less practical on long flights.  Only a fraction of the seats in the economy section have power and in my experience, four hours is about the practical limit on battery power, unless you want to schlep around extra batteries (I don't).  Worse than that, once the passenger in front of you leans their seat back, using a laptop is difficult or impossible. 

Now there is a much better alternative which is conducive to writing on a laptop -- train travel -- but it's only available on woefully few routes in the US.  I do love my trips on the relatively high speed Acela between Boston and New York or Newark, but I don't get to do that often. 

So, even when the flight attendants have ordered you to shut down all electrical devices, I can keep writing until the airplane pulls up to the jetway.  And the words turn into chapters, and eventually into completed books or stories. 

If you're a writer, do you write on planes or trains?  Do you ever write hard copy or is it all strictly on a computer device?  Do you have a favorite computer or one of the newer mobile devices for doing such work?  

If you're a reader, do you have a favorite activity for whiling away the long hours on a trip?  

Writer's Notebook: Road Trip

Road trip.  The very words still set me a-tingle.  This summer has been a time of several trips and I've seen a lot, ranging from mountain vistas to vineyards to tossing seas.  As a writer, I've always mined my trips for material and one of my favorite things to do in a novel or short story is to take the reader to a place that I've been and try to bring it to life.  Set the scene, paint the details, sketch the moment.  Ah, that's part of the joy of writing.  

Tomorrow I go on my most common type of roadtrip, an airplane trip where I do a flyover of the countryside.  You see a lot less during the trip itself, but I find the many hours aloft are a fine time to dive into the details of writing extended scenes with few distractions.  I do most of this kind of writing longhand, which is highly portable and can be done at any time during the flight.   No need to boot the looseleaf notebook or close the pages just because the pilot wants to land.  

My last few trips were on the road.  I took my oldest son to college in western North Carolina recently and he and I drove through ten states over two and one-half days.  For me, the new places were in the middle:  Route 81 crosses from Pennsylvania into Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia in short succession.  

We started the second day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the very name a harbinger of what was to come.  For on that day, we started in a rainstorm, then cleared a mountain passage on Route 78 and watched at the clouds broke, revealing the road which lay in front of us.   Within an two hours, the clouds had vanished and sun accompanied us for the rest of the trip.  

Around lunch time, we passed into West Virginia and decided to look for lunch in Martinsburg.  My wife family had settled in that area about 300 years ago, so we were curious about the town.   We drove through a residential area for about 10 minutes and began to wonder where the town center was, but finally discovered it.  The local architecture is beautiful, a mix of art deco and victorian styles, without a lot of more modern changes.  Here are a couple of samples of what we saw: 

After lunch at a Mexican restaurant downtown, we explored further -- the railroad station was just a few blocks away.   Martinsburg has a heritage of railroads and we saw an example in the roundhouse that was just across the tracks from the more recently modernized station.  

 

As all railroad buffs know, the roundhouse is where you would turn around the train in order to be able to change directions and go onto another track.  A much smaller example is found in San Francisco with their cable cars, but I'd never seen a fully enclosed building for this purpose.  Martinsburg clearly does not have a booming economy, but the people were very friendly and opened up when we mentioned the existance of family in the area.  

The road trip continued.  Our most spectacular day was on Friday morning, as we rode from Roanoke, Virginia to Tennesee and then into western North Carolina.  Here are a couple of glimpses of our vantage points:  

 

The mountains awed us as new scenes leaped up after each turn.   The two samples here are just examples of the many beauties to be seen on a drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains.  

I recently mentioned to my writing friends how remarkable I found these mountain vistas to be.  I have a feeling I'll be seeing mountains jumping into my fiction very soon.   And now, time for that next road trip.  

Next Stop, Hong Kong

The day began early: 3:00 am.  One hour later, a black limousine came by in the early moments of a fluffy snowfall and we drove to Logan Airport in Boston.  For the first time ever, I witnessed Route 128 with virtually no traffic; the snow began to cover the roadway and no trucks emerged to plow it off.  

Our plane was supposed to leave at 6:00 am.  But two inches of snow already stuck to the wings of the regional jet.  The de-icing truck came by and promptly its spurt of green liquid sputtered and died.  We didn't get underway to JFK Airport until 7:30, consuming all of our buffer for the trip.  

Upon arrival at JFK, we needed to switch terminals, since Cathay Pacific operated the plane.  We had to trudge outside in the 20 degree weather, bags in tow, board a skytrain monorail, then reverse the process to enter the terminal.  Upon arrival, one of my colleagues discovered his seat on the flight was taken, leaving only two of us to board the 777 which would bring us to Hong Kong.   

May I say, sixteen hours is way too long for a plane flight.  I won't describe it; simply, one wants to get off the plane after about 10 hours or so.  We finally arrived.  My head was sore, my gums felt swollen  and my toes were numb.  Otherwise . . .  

We changed our money to Hong Kong dollars and the agent also sold us a high speed train ticket.   After a short delay, we boarded the train.   Whoosh -- the train easily exceeded 150 mph as we took a twenty minute ride to our destination of Kowloon.  Outside, we saw a high density of fifty story apartment buildings inland and dark green mountains rising up behind us.   

At Kowloon, we found our way up one story to a shuttle bus stop.   The free bus took us through a loop on the very busy streets of Kowloon, dropping us at the final stop, the Royal Pacific Hotel and Towers.  Twenty-two hours after departing home, I was grateful to have my feet on the ground again.  

A quick shower and shave washed away the worst of my aches and pains.  About an hour later, I walked with a colleague down Canton Road, through a shopping district that looked like a cross between Times Square and Picadilly Circus; one downtown mall after another vied for our attention and dollars.  

Per the concierge, our destination was the Peking Garden.  We rounded a corner and the expanse of Hong Kong harbor lay before us.  Twilight neared and a faint veil of low clouds overhung Hong Kong city, but we had a clear view of the skyline and my colleague told me how the last Batman movie had a scene set among those buildings.   The harbor skyline looks like this from our hotel.   The tall building is Two International Financial Centre, the tallest structure in Hong Kong City.  

  

The restaurant was on the fourth floor.  The service wasn't very fast, but the food was hot, diverse and filling.   I began with a fish soup, which was okay, but eyed the Hot and Sour soup served to my friend.  We expected dim sum next, but instead our main dishes of chicken with vegetables and scallops sauteed in a soya sauce came out.   The dishes didn't disappoint and helped to fill our stomachs with more substantial food after the various lighter meals from the plane.  We washed it all down with mugs of Tsingtao beer.   The promised dim sum, filled with bits of pork, finally emerged and struck the right ending note for the meal.  

Walking back, we were approached several times by men attempting to sell us goods like watches and leather goods.   It dawned on us that we were now the minority -- caucasians in a land where the average tint of flesh tones had more yellow than ours and where even our hair stood out.  Overhead, a neon banner wished us "Season's Greetings" -- the Chinese New Year was only a few days away.    

Thus ended our first night in Hong Kong.   Exhaustion overcame us and I began the foggy sleep of the jet-lagged traveler at 8:00 pm and weighed in with ten fitful hours.  I'll write more about the trip in another post. 

Riding the Eurostar

Last week I had my first chance to take the Eurostar train that runs under the English Channel. My reaction --- do it when you get the chance!

I was writing in my journal throughout the trip. Here are some excerpts:

Blazing past the rolling green meadows of northwestern France, while Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Buffet offer a soundtrack of Mack the Knife on my Ipod. Speeds approach 200 mph; the train glides silky smooth o'er the tracks --- no annoying roars from jet engines. To my left, giant white windmills spin with a light breeze. Here's a a furrow cut through miles of early bloom farm land. There's nothing like this in the U.S. We speed along at a rate that's nearly twice as fast as New England's Acela.

The musical pace picks up with the robust hard piano chops of Ektar, playing a song called Place St. Henri. It's the real deal, courtesy of a hot young jazz group --- the instruments are piano, drums and bass, but it sounds like there is much more. We're still in France, but soon will dip below the English Channel.

Paris itself has a new novel form of transport --- bikes for rent. According to a French colleague, the first hour is free, then you pay about one Euro per hour. I saw several people using them during my 2 day stay. They can be dropped off at any of a series of bike racks set up throughout the city. One thing about Paris --- there is something new on every visit. Of course, you have to compete for road space with cars, buses and pedestrians, but the new approach is still very popular.

On curves, the train tilts on banked rails --- very cool. I just saw a sign for Calais --- the edge of the sea should be near. It must be colder here in the French countryside. The white of snow is blended on top of the green. In the background, David Gilmour sings "Wish You Were Here". Indeed!

Now, we're finally in the chunnel, 1 hour and 45 minutes into the trip. We did have a couple of stops along the way or we would have been here sooner. I took the moment to reset my watch to Greenwich Mean Time. The tunnel is dark except for occasional lights on the sides. Twenty minutes later, we emerge into the English countryside. It's very different here. The landscape is much hillier and has more coarse vegetation. We just passed a road sign that indicates London is 40 miles away. We've got to be going at least 160 mph, which is evidently new for the English portion of this trip. I'd heard that the new tracks and newly refurbished station on this side just opened last November. We had one more stop in Ebbsfleet, a rustic community and then went through a landscape that included sheep and livestock in the foreground, with tall gray windmills and factories in the distance. Our final stop was the St. Pancras station. The last time I was in the UK, it still ran into Waterloo station, but that was the old route.

The St. Pancras station is impressive. It is big and glassy, with lots of new shops and elements of ongoing construction in the background. My first thought --- this is a harbinger of 21st century transportation. Consider this: Each car held about 80 people and the train had 16 cars, offering a capacity of 1280 people. No small wonder that this train is starting to make money. Plus, we are right in the heart of London and were only a 20 minute cab ride from our business meeting. This was a very good experience. I'd be happy to do it again and don't miss dealing with the Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle airports a bit.