Feb 12
by Chris Christensen
news, travel
Airbus and Shell Oil announced a test flight was completed recently with one of the four engines operating on an alternate fuel.
The alternative fuel used on the test flight was gas to liquid (GTL), which looks like kerosene, but is clear coloured. It is a natural gas, which has been cleaned and has undergone the Fischer-Tropsch process - the conversion of synthesis gas to liquid fuel.
The goal of these experiments is to find both cheaper and “greener” fuels. While they announced the test was a success, no mention was made of how much cheaper or how much greener the fuel is than conventional jet fuel. Airlines and by extension airplane manufacturers are getting increasing pressure from the public to reduce their carbon emissions and lower ticket prices driven up in part by the rise in fuel costs.
Jan 02
This journal covers a cruise to Panama on Holland America through Insight / Geek Cruises. The cruise was a Shakespeare cruise done in conjunction with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a Mac cruise done in conjunction with MacWorld.
Friday November 2, San Jose to Florida
The alarm goes off very early when you are trying to be at the airport before 6am for a 6:50am flight. A close friend Brad volunteered to take us to the airport… a very close friend indeed. Although in reality it was his wife Janice who actually woke up when their alarm went off so very early in the morning.
Our flights to Atlanta and then on to Fort Lauderdale were both happily uneventful and we used the time to sleep, read magazines ( I brought 2-3 inches of my backlog for this leg of the trip), or do homework (Joan). We took a shuttle ($15 a person) to the Westin Fort Lauderdale where I was surprised to find that I had apparently reserved a suite.
Almost immediately after our arrival we went to a party put on by the Shakespeare at Sea / Insight Cruises program that we were joining for this trip. By the time that the evening was done we had met more people on this cruise without setting foot on the boat than we had in a week at sea on our previous cruise. Most of the crowd was older than us, some by a margin. They also were more regular or more recent patrons of the Oregon Shakespeare festival than Joan and I. I had gone to Ashland, where OSF resides, in 2006 with our kids and their high school drama group but we had not been to the festival for a few years before that. Before the birth of our kids Joan and I had gone more regularly. I had gone to Ashland with a group from my high school 4 years in a row in the 1970s. The vast majority of the people at the party were from the west coast and the majority were from the San Francisco bay area. We very quickly found interesting people to talk to. We even found some Mac people who ventured in from the Mac party and some others like myself who were fans of both Mac and Shakespeare.
Before going to bed I recorded a new introduction to an old episode of the Amateur Traveler podcast for publication on November 10th.
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