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August 23, 2014August 23, 2014

Europe 2014 (Part 3 of 6) | The UK – London

As mentioned previously, Seapine Software has an office in Kew, near Kew Gardens:

Given our office’s location, and Claudine’s desire to see the Cotswolds’ (aka Merry Old England) our sight seeing would be focused on this the highlighted area.

Our flight to the UK was mostly uneventful. We left Dayton Ohio around 2pm headed for Washington DC. In DC we had a short layover and boarded the flight to London on time, then were held on the runway for about an hour due to weather.

We got into London, picked up our Rental car, and headed to the office. The first few miles driving on the wrong side of the road, after 10 hours of flying and little sleep is always tricky.

I talked with the guys in the office, and prepped the hardware that I was going to replace that evening, while Claudine visited Kew Gardens.

She returned to Kew and we had a late lunch at Pizza Express next to the office:

Then she went out shopping and touring Richmond area while I worked that evening. We ate a late dinner at the hotel/restaurant. Dinner was good.

On Thursday I returned to the Office, for the first half of the day. Claudine returned to Kew Gardens, apparently it’s an amazing place.

That afternoon we took the tube to Covent Gardens for a little shopping, and entertainment. It was about the only time it rained on us and it didn’t rain much.

The street performers were out:

The market was nice, very busy, and if you know me you know just how much I love a good crowd of people.

We had dinner with Ashley and his family at a pub in Richmond that evening. The obligatory food shot:

On Friday our first real FREE tourist day we got up early and headed downtown London to the Tower. We were told to get there early, get tickets, get in and head straight for the crown jewels so that’s exactly what we did. It was raining when we got off the train so we bought tickets and umbrellas.

They are in the midst of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the start of World War 1 and have planted 888,246 ceramic poppies, one for each casualty in the war on the grounds of The Tower.

It was quite amazing.

Sorry, no photos of the crown jewels but you can read about them at the link. They are rather impressive. That 500+ carat diamond, well I didn’t think it was real, but it is.

Inside the main tower armory they have a really impressive display of armor.

After the Tower tour we walked across the Tower Bridge to another market.

That’s right, another CROWDED market, full of goodness but the lines were incredible, unless you wanted bread Winking smile

We had planned to eat there and I decided to grab a burger at one of the stands. Claudine headed off to another vendor. I stood there for 30+ minutes and never moved in the queue and I was only like 5th in line. When the guy in front of me ordered basically what I was going to order and it was 20 quid, I lost it. No way, no how am I going to spend essentially $35US on a burger and fries, it just can’t be that good. After being ignored for about 35 minutes and bumped into about 45 times cause this particular vendor was on the main drag, that was it. I was out. No more crowded markets for me, just don’t see the attraction.

We walked back across the river to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.

Then up through St. James Park to Buckingham Palace

Then back on the train back to Kew to grab the car and go to one of my favorite places over there. Pincho. It’s like tradition for me to eat there when I visit.

This would be our last day in London, tomorrow we head out for the Cotswolds’ and Bath.

August 23, 2014August 23, 2014

Europe 2014 (Part 2 of 6) | Planning

Travel Planning sucks, it just does.

Air Travel

For years I had traveled on US Airways, out of Dayton (closer to my home), they were price competitive and the flights were always nice. Good clean equipment which always functioned. In seat entertainment was better than the crap we had on one United Flight. As part of the Star Alliance, those United miles counted.

So for years we’ve saved up miles. We had a US Airways card at one point and racked up miles for our regular purchases. We don’t really Credit Card, but we were playing the points game. Every time we wanted to go somewhere and I tried to use the miles it was nothing but an exercise in frustration. When we started collecting miles, it looked like it would take 35k miles for an international flight. When we had 35k miles it now took 45k miles. When we had 45k miles I needed 50k. We now have 80k miles and I still couldn’t get Claudine’s ticket paid for.

And it gets better. Since we’re doing a multi-city flight, not taking off and coming back to the same place, you can’t book that kind of ‘award’ travel online. So you have to call.

I actually found the flights we wanted on US Airways, from DAY (Dayton) to LHR (Heathrow) to MUC (Munich) and back to DAY.

I called them and tried to use my miles for one of the tickets. No can do, those flights no longer existed. They weren’t really very interested in helping me either. I was pissed. And magically, the flights that I had found (Using KAYAK) actually no longer existed. I could no longer find them, with any travel search engine. Aggravated, I waited a day, they were still ‘non-existent’.

The next best deal was booking United Flights through Lufthansa, about $1700 round trip (multi-city for us). Lufthansa (as is United) were Star Alliance members. I talked this through with Kevin (who said, yeah, just book the seats and use your points for upgrades after the fact, that will probably work best for you). He said, you should be able to get into First Class one direction for less than 70k miles. Or so we thought.

Turns out that American had recently bought US Airways, which means, they were no longer part of Star Alliance, which means once again, no you can’t use your miles for anything good. Grrr….

Rental Cars

Again using Kayak, I booked the best Rental cars deals I could find. These ended up being booked through RentalCars.com, something I’ll never do again.

First the Kayak deal wasn’t super great, it wasn’t half the price of booking direct with any of these places but it was still a deal. Until it’s not.

The UK rental turned into a huge bait and switch. I booked a car for almost a week (Wednesday through Monday morning and pre-paid $350.00 (US). Upon arrival they ‘upgraded me’ from a car that cost $65 US to a car that only costs 45 a day, what they didn’t share with me until afterwards, or that I didn’t catch on too was that car was 45 GBP per day (aka $80 a day), and they charged all kinds of fees. A fee for the shuttle, a fee for picking up a car at an airport depot, and more. All of these things were supposed to be included in my rentalcar.com pre-paid reservation. They also really tried to snow me with the insurance. In fact they initially said I had to have it to rent the car. I explained to them, I spoke with my insurance agent, I’m covered, I’m also covered under our business policy since this is a business trip, I was told ‘Explicitly’ to deny any extra coverage. They made me sign a waiver and acceptance that I was on the hook for a 17,000 GBP if anything went wrong, they don’t deal with any insurance companies other than their own.

This was Eurocar/Avis in the UK, and I’ll never rent from them again. The car was fine, but the service was horrible.

The RentalCar.com deal in the UK (with Budget) went exactly as planned. No bait and switch, no other add-ons other than a 6 Euro fee to add Claudine as a driver. I will happily rent from them again.

Now, do you need a car in London/UK? Well driving on the wrong side of the road is a thrill but it’s not for everyone. You don’t, unless you a) have a ton of luggage which we did and that makes train travel a real pain. I was carrying some equipment in a pelican case that made train travel not worth while. A 100 GBP taxi ride both directions, for me was 2/3rds the cost of a rental car and then I have a car. We also needed/wanted a car to drive through the Cotswolds, and western UK. But now, if I’m not doing those things, a taxi/or train ride will do ya. Especially if you stay near the Office. There’s a nice boutique hotel that’s reasonable and it’s a two block walk.

In Germany, you’re on the right side of the road, driving there is no different than here. The Marriott is about ~20 mins from the hotel, and about ~20 mins from our office so a car is needed there unless you’re going to be with the sales guys all day and have them chauffer you around. Since most of my work was happening off-hours for them, that wasn’t going to work.

We also planned to do a little road trip in Germany too. Down to see some castles and drive through the Alps. So yeah a car was needed.

Hotels.

We did a couple things here. I’m a Marriott guy. I like Marriott I have had good results with Marriott properties. They are clean, and if you shop around they aren’t over priced IMHO.

We also play the points game with Marriott. The other credit card I use for fuel mostly earns me Marriott points, plus for the $69 annual fee that they always waive for me when I ask I also get a free stay every year. I use these free stays on motorcycle trips and shoots. This year I used our free nights stay at the Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel. It was a $250 room after currency conversions that cost us $0.00. We also stayed at the Marriott at Heathrow the night before our trip to Germany for $0.00 on points.

So in the UK we stayed at the Kew Gardens Hotel a nice little boutique hotel in Kew, two blocks from the office. We have a negotiated business rate there and it was ‘cheap’ and it included breakfast. The wifi in the hotel room was OK, but not great. There was no wifi and no Cellular coverage what-so-ever in the restaurant/pub. We stayed there for 3 nights, the last two nights in Bristol and by the airport. In the past I have stayed at the Marriott in Twickenham but it was completely booked so Kew had to do and it was fine.

In Germany, the office is in a business park just outside of Hallbergmoos, there’s not much in Halbergmoos so we typically stay at the Marriott in Freising and we stayed there again.

It’s been recently renovated which means it now has AC, it didn’t use too and previously it sucked when it was hot out. I have a few bones to pick with them, but overall the room was spectacular, and the service was pretty good and the price with breakfast was fair for what we got in return. They neglected to let us know that the pool/hot tub/spa was unavailable. When you walk 10 miles a day seeing stuff a hot tub is a nice thing to have and in fact we had looked forward to using it.

Sight Seeing Planning

We sort of had a travel agenda, but we didn’t have any plans for anything that required reservations, or so we thought. We needed to stay flexible because this was a working vacation. We needed to make sure that if work was required we didn’t loose any money on something we couldn’t get too.

So our loose agenda was this.

Tuesday: Travel
Wednesday: Arrive in UK in the AM
– Go Straight to the Office we couldn’t get into the hotel yet anyway, Claudine could visit Kew Gardens on her own
Thursday: Finish work in the UK, then do some evening sight seeing.
Friday (v): Do London for a day, London Tower and surrounding things.
Saturday: Drive out through the Cotswolds, then to Bath, and into Bristol for the night.
Sunday: More Bath, then south to the ocean/English channel, through the New Forest.
Monday: Travel to Germany
– Visit the Office, Office work Late Monday Night
Tuesday: More office work about half the day
– Tour Munich in the afternoon
Wednesday (v): Road Trip to Neuschwanstein Castle, visit the Austrian Alps, and then back to the hotel.
Thursday (v): Sight see around Freising/Landshut TBD, but take it easy for early Friday AM flight
Friday: Travel back to the US.

So, 2 complete days lost to traveling, 9 days in-country, about 4 and a half of those working[tm], leaving about 4 and half days to enjoy the sights, 11 days in total. (v) denotes days taken as vacation days.

August 23, 2014August 23, 2014

Europe 2014 (Part 1 of 6)

The company I work for (Seapine Software) has offices in the United Kingdom and in Germany. I’ve traveled over there about a half dozen times in the past for IT and Office related things. Most trips are pretty brutal. In fact my first 3 trips, I spent more times on planes than I did in any country.

Flying over for basically a day’s worth of work, by the time you factor in 12 hours of flight time (between connecting flights and lay overs) and the time shift (losing a half a day on the way over). Flying in on a Wednesday and back on a Saturday nets you more time in the air than in the country. It kind of puts a damper on the “Oooh you get to go to (insert European country here). It wasn’t all that.

In 2010 we (a colleague and I) visited both the UK and German offices. The goal on that trip was to upgrade some routing equipment in the UK and physically move the German office from the Munich airport into what is now our current office. So it was a much longer trip. Approximately 8 days.

We were able to get our work done in the UK and in an effort to keep the flights cheaper stayed over a weekend. That gave us two days to kick around Great Britain. After moving the German office and getting the IT infrastructure set up, we again had about a day and a half to kick around.

We did whirl-wind tours in both places. Driving about 1000 miles in both countries in less than 48 hours rushing around to ‘see’ things. But we still had fun.

Fast forward to 2014. We need to visit these offices more. They are smaller sales offices and the guys over there don’t always feel like they are part of the bigger Seapine Culture. It pays to visit them and help them feel loved.

At the beginning of the year we sent some router hardware over there, but not the type of gear that anyone there in the office could install. We also needed to deploy some other newer gear that we provide them from the states.

Due to changing personnel and other economic conditions we didn’t get the opportunity to actually visit and install said hardware until now (August).

That’s what the catalyst for this trip. My wife always wanted to tag along, but the previous trips just weren’t conducive. Like I said, very little time to actually get there, and do much outside of working. But this time we planned it to tack on a couple extra days in each country. Claudine is pretty self sufficient so she could run around and see things on her own while I worked in each office. The next few blog posts will be a retrospective of that trip. Things we saw, things we’d do again, and things we’d pass on.

Enjoy,

-MD

July 4, 2014August 3, 2014

We SOLD our 2003 Pontiac Minivan

We bought it used in 2010 with 117k miles, it now has 192k miles.

Why is that news you might ask? Well it’s not.

Anyone who knows us, knows how much we loved it. And by loved it, I mean hated it. It wasn’t a horrible van. I mean, it drove OK. It mostly worked. It got Claudine to Florida every winter. But we spent $5k on it in 2010 which at the time we thought that was a fair price. In the 4 years we’ve owned it we’ve probably spent another $4k just keeping it on the road. Yeah it’s a 10 year old vehicle and stuff will wear out. But we replaced stuff that honestly shouldn’t have been needed. I’m not talking about brakes, and shocks. After a bunch of miles and years you’re going to have to replace those things.

But all of that said. Having shopped for cars for Molly and driven a bunch of JUNK, I was really surprised we had to give it away. KBB put the value of that thing in ‘good’ condition to be between $3900 and $4200. It was completely loaded, never been wrecked, and the interior, while dirty was in awesome shape. Most everything still worked, except the dash lights around the speedo and the heated seats.

While shopping for Molly we drove a 2003 Mazda Tribute (aka Ford Escape) with 250,000 miles. It was like new. Obviously well taken care of and garaged. Someone clearly drove this a long way every day on the highway but it drove great. Was it worth $5000? I don’t think so but that’s what they sold it for.

We also drove a bunch of overpriced junk. The whole Cash for Clunkers thing still has used cars all screwed up. We originally advertised the van for $3000. While I thought that was kind of high, I figured we’d take $2700 if offered. Comparable vans on Craigslist seemed to be priced around the same. But at $3k we had no offers, calls or emails for a week. So I started lowering it $100 a day. First $2900 for two days, then $2800, then $2700. Still not a lot of action. I had a couple of calls but honestly talked them out of it. It wasn’t the van for them. You do NOT want this for a cab service, no-way-no how.

And then it happened. We realized we need to get rid of it. See when you buy a new car you have coverage on it and your old car for 30 days under most policies. Our 30 days was coming up so we had to get rid of it or write a new insurance policy for it. More out-go that we didn’t need or want.

So I advertised it for $2000.00 CASH this weekend ONLY. (last weekend).

Then the calls started coming. A little old lady visiting her sister in Dayton wanted to buy it and drive it home to Florida. She was a little miffed that I wouldn’t take a check. No ma’am, sorry cash only. “But the banks won’t be open Saturday”. Sure they are, till about noon, just go cash a check and you’ll be good to go. She was kind enough to leave me a voice mail that it wasn’t going to work out.

Then another couple called…

They wanted it but only had $1300.00, said they’d write me a check for the difference if I held that for 30 days. What? No. Then offered up laptops and kids tablets and all kinds of crap in trade that you surely shouldn’t have if you don’t have a car. But we didn’t need nor want any of that. Then actually tried to put the pressure on me, saying there was one closer to them (They were in Indiana) that they were gong to buy instead. Pfft, fine. Go do that. I mean we felt for them, and Claudine and I talked about what we’d take in an effort to help someone else ‘get a leg up’ on life.

I explained to them, for them, we’d take $1500 cash. Not a penny less. If they wanted it, sell some of their gadgets/laptops, etc and scrape up $200 more dollars. I was told it would take them ‘time’ to get to $1500. We told them if it was still here when they did, it was theirs.

Then the folks who finally bought it. Were mostly local. They met me, test drove it, and decided they wanted it on Sunday afternoon. But… They didn’t have the money either. They could bring me $500 cash on Tuesday to hold it until Thursday when they got paid. I was a tad irritated but said OK. On Tuesday they brought me a friggin check.

“Sorry, we didn’t have time to go to the bank”. I was aggravated, but they needed it and I wanted rid of it, so I said, “OK but look, $2000 cash on Thursday, cash as in dead green presidents, or I’m relisting it. I’m not going to mess with your check, just bring me cash.

We set a time for Thursday at 3pm. Which of course changed to 4:30. but they did come, pay cash and took the van. They were happy to have it, and needed it.

It was clear to me that this family was broke, and living pay-check to pay-check. We’ve been there, and it sucks. We’ve probably given out a dozen of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Make Over books over the years. It really changed our life. On Monday I ordered another 10 planning to give one to this family but they didn’t come in time.

Using the address that was on the check they tried to give us, I attempted to deliver the book yesterday. Wholly moly. That house is empty, as in foreclosed on, and for sale empty, as in they don’t live there and haven’t for a while. I suspect the check likely would have bounced, maybe not but this didn’t look good, at all. Yep they needed this book, but now I have no way to get it to them.

So if you are they, and you happen to read this. Send me an email, and I’ll give you a copy of the book.

Selling cars sucks. Shopping for cars can suck. Saving your money and having cash to buy things doesn’t suck.

June 28, 2014June 28, 2014

AutoPalooza at the Disher’s household.

Molly now has new wheels.

She saved her money and took advantage of the the 401-Disher Auto matching funds. Well almost. We’re in a Co-Ownership position at the moment.

But she now has a car with AC and it’s a convertible, and it’s an automatic since driving a manual really wasn’t going to be part of her long-term auto strategy. I’m sure she would eventually master it, she’s usually good at just about everything she does. Except bowling. I’m afraid, driving a manual might be just like bowling. Winking smile