Miscellaneous

Alan Jacobs, who tweets a good deal on all sorts of things, and probably should be getting on with his real writing more often, sent a wonderful Tweet during the early days of the Soccer World Cup:

This ball might as well be an Elgin Marble, so incapable are the Greeks of retaining possession of it.

I only remembered about this because I've been keeping a list of various items I want to use at some point in the blog, or elsewhere. They're a pretty random bunch, and it's hard to think how I'd place Jacobs' line otherwise than by just plunking it down on the page.

Here's something totally different, relating to the number of bags that are lost annually by air companies. (By the way, if you travel a lot and want to prevent hair loss from stress, don't read the following!)

Apparently 25 million items of luggage are misplaced globally each year, or one bag per 100 passenger. Pretty scary. We've only ever had one bag go astray, and that was between Dunedin and Wellington last year. We stayed in Wgtn for a couple of days, but the bag still didn't manage to get there. Finally we carried onto Napier, our next destination, and somehow or other (since Air NZ didn't know we were going there) the bag managed to get there ahead of us!

So when do bags go missing? Here are the stats:

- Transfer baggage mishandling (52 per cent)

- Failure to load (16 per cent)

- Passenger bag switch/security/ticketing error (13 per cent)

- Loading/offloading (7 per cent)

- Airport/customs/weather/space-weight restriction (6 per cent)

- Arrival station mishandling (3 per cent)

- Tagging errors (3 per cent)

It's those transfers that are the big problem. I watched a bunch of guys throwing (yup, that's how it's done) bags onto a trolley while waiting for my plane to move onto the next destination a few weeks ago. None of the bags were checked in terms of whether they should have been taken off the plane or not. In fact, the guys didn't look at the labels at all. No wonder things go astray.

Getting the Tickets in Advance

As my wife and I plan our trip to England, we’ve spent a lot of time on the Net checking out prices. Boy, is it confusing!
Take rail tickets for starters. You can’t believe how complex these are. It depends on what day you go, when you go on the day, whether the day is a holiday or not, what time of the year it is, whether they provide caviar and champagne (just kidding!). We could get a trip from London to Norwich (which is what we wanted to do) for £6.00 on the Sunday we wanted to go. If we’d gone the following week it would have cost £37.00! But then we discovered Rail Cards – until we have the right Rail Card in hand, we can’t book anything anyway! Good grief.
We checked out Ryanair for flights, because we were told they were the cheapest all round. And they are, but figuring out when to go is a bit of a nightmare. That’s something we’ll have to do when we get there, I think.
We’re not going to the UK via America this time, so we won’t be dropping in on places like Disney World. But if I wanted to get Disney World Tickets the place to go online is Orlandofuntickets.com. They do discount tickets for Disney World, all the Orlando theme parks, dinner shows and attractions. They know that figuring out all the factors involved in planning a trip to these sorts of place is intimidating – to use their word. So they’ve done all the work for you, and you only have to log onto them and get planning!
Would that it was as easy figuring out British Rail!