News and Views

We arrived in Taiwan on Tuesday, after a 14-hour flight from Los Angeles (LAX). We are here for almost 3 weeks, primarily to see Devon, but also to tour some places we haven’t been.

It turns out that we chose a bad time to come. The plan was to spend a week with Devon, then a few days traveling, then another week with Devon in Taipei before going back home. There are two glitches.

1) Devon was preparing for the GRE most of the first week. He is seriously working towards coming home and going to graduate school in the fall, for which we are glad, but it meant that he wasn’t as free to spend time with us as we had hoped. However, he took the test on Friday (yesterday) so he should be freer now.

2) Next week when we planned to travel turns out to be a big holiday here, with most people taking off Wednesday – Friday. When we tried to schedule a tour, we were told that everything was booked full.

If we had known about the problems, we could have delayed the trip a week and avoided them both. As it is we will have to wait and travel a bit the first part of our last week here after the holiday. That should still work out OK. We hope to sail to one of the tiny offshore islands for a couple of days.

Weather here has been nice — short sleeves in the day, long sleeves in the evening. Our hotel is pretty nice, and near Devon’s apartment.

The flight over was pretty nice too. As we get older, we are less inclined to put up with inconveniences and discomfort when we travel, so frequently upgrade our flights and hotels. Gisele sometimes complains that it is not worth it, but she is always glad to enjoy the upgrades. Traveling business class out of LAX, you get to go through a shorter TSA line, and on the flight we got to stretch out and sleep flat, besides enjoying attentive service and good food (lobster for dinner!). It really helped us feel more refreshed when we arrived, though there is no real cure for jet lag except time. But sleeping pills at night and coffee in the morning both help.