Escape to New York

OK, we’ve heading back to New York, and the comparative safety of the city. We’ll be close to the airport if the storm is overblown (sorry, couldn’t resist with that or the picture) and I’d rather be in the city if disaster does hit because the apartment is well-situated and there’s good looting opportunities.

The drive back up was none too difficult, a bit of extra traffic but all road tolls were excused and traffic flowed well. We had one thing to do on the way – lunch with an old friend named B. We’d met in Malaysia at an aviation conference in 1998, when I was editing a newsletter on aviation IT (not as dull as it sounds). A few minutes after meeting a very bad local karaoke band had started a pidgin version of a Spice Girls track and neither of us cold suppress giggles.

We’ve been good friends ever since; I spent a memorable first US Thanksgiving with her family and she and some of the family stayed with me in London when visiting. B specialises in family travel, my idea of hell, and is one of a new breed of travel agents that got in early online. Thanks to her I was able to navigate the very murky world of early online booking systems and score some great deals.

Few people under 30 get what a hassle it was getting abroad in the days before online. You had to physically go to a shop in order to not only purchase tickets, but then also to pick them up. The whole system of flight booking depended on a massive early computer system - SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment). This was one of the first computer booking systems, set up as an IBM spin-off and by 1976 allowed travel agents the then-magical ability to book flights nearly instantaneously.

It was a very profitable business, but the internet cut a huge segment out of it, as it has with a lot of industries including mine. B got into the internet early and now works from home - and occasionally from a cruise ship, beach resort or Peruvian mountain - setting up holidays for families with children, and more importantly sorting out problems when they occur.

Anyway, we hadn’t actually seen each other in years, and a 1:30pm lunch stretched into 5pm, at which point the waiters were getting restive and a second portion of pudding increasingly attractive. We said a fond farewell and parted ways.

We had planned to go up north for an hour and see M’s old home town, but the second we got onto the freeway traffic was nearly static. Lots of commuters - it was Friday afternoon - but a lot of very stuffed cars too, and not everyone heads to the country for the weekend with that many supplies.

We stopped off for water, a torch and a few essentials before heading back to D&D’s place, dropping the car off as we went. According to a policeman in a bar we stopped in they were expecting flooding not too serious. We shall see.