27 Hops from Home

As I type this, I’m dialed into my Earthlink account from the Holiday Inn Express in Seattle. For some reason known only to the Packet Gods, traffic from here to my own server gets routed from Seattle to Portland to San Fracncisco to San Jose to Palo Alto to Sacramento to New York to Montreal to New Brunswick and finally to Charlottetown. 27 hops in all. And at the end of a slow modem connection, it’s like computing through thick jello. At least I can take some solace from the fact that my packets are travelling through most of the North American cities where exciting tech stuff was born; perhaps some of this will rub off?

Johnny and Jodi’s wedding went off without a hitch (well, okay, the wedding cake did fall over, which is technically a hitch), and we really enjoyed ourselves. We took the ferry from Nanaimo down to Vancouver this morning, and then drove down to Seattle this afternoon.

A note on the ferries: the Washington State Ferries trip we took from Anacortes to Sidney was much more pleasant than the BC Ferries trip we took today in almost all respects. Washington accepts online reservations and then deducts your reservation fee from your fare; BC Ferries simply tacks an extra $15 on your fare to let you reserve. Washington has an excellent, information-rich website, whereas the BC Ferries site is confusing and hard to navigate. The Washington ferry was clean, well serviced, and had plenty of seating; the BC ferry was dirty, smelly, had about 2.3 times more people than seats, and a 30 minute wait to even get into the cafeteria. If you’re going from Seattle to Vancouver Island by ferry, I’d highly recommend the Anacortes to Sidney routing.

Johnny and Jodi are off to Zurich on Tuesday morning for a well-deserved honeymoon, vacation and reunion with Jodi’s nannypast. Catherine and Oliver and I are in Seattle on Monday for random jangling around, then back to Harrisville, NH for 10 days for a sort of working vacation in New England.

More as the situation develops.