Worst... travel experience... ever

I'm going to take a few paragraphs to describe my recent six-day business trip to Baltimore and then Amsterdam with my wonderful boss Deirdre of the SLTPPC. It will obviously -- due to sheer hellishness -- stand as the trip by which I measure other travel experiences in the future.

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The plan: We were to go to visit with Avi (and Peter, Drew, Dan, Mike, David, David, Doug... Dan was at Eurocrypt) at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and then to the INDICARE workshop on Fair DRM Use in Amsterdam at the Information Law Institute of the Unversity of Amsterdam Faculty of Law. Sounds simple, huh?

OAK to IAD: We almost missed our plane to Baltimore. That is, we arrived at the Oakland airport at 6:40 for a 6:55 flight. Needless to say, our seats had already been given up. The next flight was for 22:00 that evening which would not get us to Baltimore in time for the event. They issued us boarding passes for the 22:00 flight so that we could get through security... apparently, I am now on the TSA Watch list, oh boy!

We proceeded to make total assholes out of ourselves and muscle through the extremely long security line. Because of this, we were "selectees" and got the extra-special security search (which is not as bad as it sounds). We got to the gate at 6:50. Remarkably, no one else wanted to go to Baltimore and we got on the plane! We didn't get a chance to check our luggage and during the security check my mini-leatherman was confiscated, although my large pocketknife and various nailclippers made it through unscathed.

Baltimore: What the hell is with the 450 and I-95? Could commuting be any worse than this? Bumper-to-bumper for 60 miles equals about three and a half hours in a car. Then, Johns Hopkins has about the worst signage of any campus I have ever been on. It took us an hour to find the Information Security Institute (which is located in a medical building, go figure). I'll talk more about Baltimore later this summer.

OAK to AMS: Because of ticket pricing, we had to fly from Dulles to Newark, New Jersey and then to Amsterdam. However, neither of us knew that Newark is the second worst airport in the country according to the FAA and likely the smelliest (it's the dumps). It had been raining non-stop in Newark for a few days and everything was screwed up. There was a ground-stop which meant that our puddle-jumper from Dulles spent two and a half hours on the tarmac waiting for Newark to clear up and let planes to take off and land. Our plane to Amsterdam left Newark before we left Dulles. So, we ended up stranded in Newark. The carrier, Continnental, got us a hotel room and put us on a flight to Amsterdam the next day at 17:00, in first class.

Mental note: Newark completely closes down at 21:00. If your plane arrives late or close to this time, you'd better haul ass to get your bags or you can't get them until 05:00 the next morning. We were too late and had to wear the same clothes for about 48 hours when all was said and done.

We did get to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, which you could spend a whole day at. And flying to Amsterdam first class is rather neat... It was my first first-class experience and man I can see why that is so damn expensive. We arrived in Amsterdam at 07:00 and had to give a talk at 09:00. That gave us just enough time to clear customs, get to the hotel, shower and change our clothes. We essentially didn't sleep the night before as the flight is only 6 hours and we needed that to work on our slides (which we didn't end up using).

We got to the Faculty of Law building at the University of Amsterdam at 08:45 only to find out that it had been "cancelled" a few days earlier because the heat wave in Amsterdam made the room we were scheduled to be in unbearable (30 degrees C, y'all). We then just went to the Information Law Institute and miraculously found the right place to be. I found a place to sit that looked uncomfortable enough so that I wouldn't fall asleep after not sleeping for 24 hours. Then I saw that I had a nameplate in the center table with all the big wigs, oh joy. That would keep me awake.

The workshop was great. Very very interesting comparing EU and US copyright law, consumer protection law and DRM. There were people from Nokia, WIPO and all the European public interest groups you could think of. We managed to stay awake and make some great contributions to the discussion and even drink some lambic during the cocktail hour and the Indonesian Rijstafel dinner (you have to experience this method of eating where they bring you one of everything on the menu all at once).

The next day Pam, Deirdre and I went to the Van Gogh Museum and spent a couple hours leisurely wandering through the Egon Schiele exhibit. Wonderful... all our travel was by foot... the only way to go (next to bikes) in Amsterdam.

AMS to OAK: You'd think things couldn't get much worse on the traveling side of the equation... and you'd be wrong. The fact that I'm on the TSA Watch list was a slight but not insurmountable problem with getting out of Amsterdam. The eleven-hour flight seriously sucked... although I watched Ocean's Twelve, which wasn't total crap.

We were supposed to fly into Houston and then straight to Oakland. There was a gigantic thunderstorm in Houston and we were barely even able to land. I'm talking torrential downpour with serious lightning... the kind where you barely register that a bolt has struck before the whole building is shaken by thunder that could make you wet your pants.

In Houston, the bags don't come off the plane in this kind of weather... likely due to a contractual arrangment between the workers and the airline/airport. So we waited in the secure baggage claim area before customs in Houston for about three and a half hours. The last hour was the worse as the power went off which caused the brand-new fire alarm system to go off incessantly. I'm talking lights, full sirens and a robotic voice trying to tell us to remain calm... for a solid hour.

We finally got our bags and proceeded through customs in about ten minutes flat as all the other planes in the airport were waiting on the five international flights that were stuck in the pre-customs baggage claim area.

We got on the plane to Oakland and you'd think that would be the end... and it wasn't. I sat down next to Jonathan Cobb of Kiptronic, who was debugging the Kiptronic code like mad... more on Kiptronic in another post (after moving to the new server and upgrading to Tiger!).

We waited at the gate for an hour for the weather to clear and to be refueled... only to return to the gate, deplane and get on a new plane due to a malfunctioning sensor in the plane that meant the plane couldn't take off if the humans wanted it to. After spending roughly 24 hours in planes and airports from Amsterdam to Oakand, we got home about 04:30 in the morning on Monday morning.

I hate planes.