Travel Bug Robert
Finding the funny in the world.

Glencairn Bed and Breakfast: the zany video

After I posted my original Glencairn Bed and Breakfast video, the website I was producing videos for contacted me and said they wanted the zany sound effects.  So I re-edited the video in my traditional, nontraditional style.  At first I wasn’t even going to post the first video, but then I thought comparing the two might be an interesting study in editing for tone.  Maybe it’s the film major in me.  I know this is a travel blog and not a film blog, but I figured what the heck.  With the garden, great hospitality, full Irish breakfast, and scenic views of the Irish countryside, this is a top place to stay in Cork. Don’t be like everyone else and stay at a hotel; stay at the Glencairn and get a healthy dose of “Real Ireland.”

Glencairn Bed and Breakfast: the relaxing video

I’ve been producing some videos for another travel website. I made one for the bed and breakfast I stayed at in Cork and tried to make the video as conventional as possible, i.e. no zany sound effects. Here’s that video.

Cork Airport! I’m finally here with a ticket for a flight that’s not cancelled!

It’s 4am right now, and I am sitting at Cork airport.  It is starting to look more like a reality that my 6am flight to Amsterdam is going to take off.  After six days of unscheduled travels, it doesn’t feel right that I’m about to travel to the place I was planning on visiting.  I hate to say it, but I’m almost a little disappointed.  Who knows what adventures I would have had if I took the ferry?  And now, whenever I tell this story–which I think will be often–I’ll come to Thursday and say, “And that’s the day I got on the plane and flew to Amsterdam.”  Then people will ask, “So you didn’t get on the 18 hour ferry?  You actually got to your final destination without spending a stolen afternoon in Paris?”  I will hang my head and nod.  ”Yes, by Thursday, air travel was operating at 90% in Europe, so I never got that chance.”

I suppose I still could get on the ferry, but if I don’t have to go on it, it feels like I would just be doing it on some masochistic principle.  A three hour flight compared to 25 hours of transportation is a little easier to take.  And now I’ll have just about the same amount of time to see what I wanted to see (I changed my flight to leave next Thursday).

The check in desk is about to open.  There’s already a line.  I better get in it.

Ponderings on an Ash Cloud

[The main reason for me visiting Europe was to see some friends of mine who are currently living in Europe.  Another reason was to shoot some new travel videos for a website called Tripfilms.  As I've been using my printed itinerary as scratch paper these days, Tripfilms asked me to blog about my current experience for their site.  I figured I'd post it here, too.  So here goes:]

When I got on a flight from Los Angeles to Dublin April 12th, I wasn’t thinking I’d get stranded in Ireland because of an Icelandic volcano.  I was thinking about how I didn’t have enough legroom and how the lady next to me was hogging the armrest.  The last time I even thought of the word “volcano” was probably three years ago when I watched the Pierce Brosnan film Dante’s Peak.  Volcanoes were not a top priority for me last Monday.  Now my entire future rests in the hands of a volatile, geothermal pimple on the surface of the earth.

What are the odds? What are the odds 97,000 flights would be cancelled because of a volcano erupting?  The last time this volcano erupted was in 1821.  I’m no statistics major, but I think the odds weren’t great.

For me, this situation means more time in Ireland.  Not the worst problem to have.  I’ve seen more of Cork, the seaside town of Kinsale, and the western town of Galway.  I was intending to travel around Europe for a while.  What’s another six days in Ireland?  For tens of thousands of others, though, this means they’re missing work in foreign countries, they can’t deliver their perishible products, and they can’t attend important celebrations.

We may never fully understand the ripples caused by this volcano.  For every wedding missed, two strangers stuck in an airport might meet and get married.  For every rotting shipment of lamb, a delivery supervisor might smell the meat and follow his true calling as a vegan restauranteur.  I’ve met new friends during my delay that I will correspond with the rest of my life.  If I flew out as planned last Friday, I would never have had a wonderful afternoon with Pilar in Galway and learned about cutting edge Spanish film directors.

Humanity’s history has been one of technological innovations, of harnessing earth’s powers for human’s wants and needs.  But still, even in 2010, all of our advancements can’t battle something from prehistoric times.  Thoreau said something once about how we don’t ride the railroad, that the railroad rides us.  Now instead of trains riding us, it’s airplanes.  How far we have come.

So what does the world do now?  How can we prepare for another ash cloud?  It’s not like volcanoes fit through an airport X-Ray machine.  We can prevent guns from getting on a plane, but we can’t prevent ash from entering the atmosphere.  Does this mean we return to the days of sea travel?  More ferries departing from ports?  Do we build long bridges?  More chunnels?  With billions of dollars already lost by this ash cloud, how many billions more will governments be willing to spend to prevent more billions lost?  Or will they just play the odds?  The world was safe from this volcano for 189 years.  What are the chances it will happen again?

I don’t have any of the answers.  As a normal civilian, I don’t have much say in those decisions, especially since I don’t even live in Europe.  I do know I will continue to travel the world despite this volcano.  Like the threat of terrorism, I won’t let the threat of a volcanic eruption prevent me from experiencing the joys of traveling.  That’s not the way I want to live, voluntarily stranded in America.  I will approach my journeys a bit differently in the future, though.  On my next trip, I’m buying travel insurance.

TBR Special Report: Stuck in Ireland

So to catch you up, if you haven’t been reading my blog or opened a newspaper or turned on the news, one of Iceland’s volcanoes–the one with the really long name–started erupting.  Now, if we were living in the middle ages, that’d be fine.  We probably wouldn’t even know about it, until our crop fields got covered in ash.  But now that we have modern air travel, that volcanic ash in the air has prevented all European airline travel from happening.  Every flight has been cancelled, including mine.  Actually, to be perfectly fair, multiple flights of mine have been cancelled, since I’ve continuously tried to get on flights that departed later in the week.

And the funny thing is, Ireland is pretty close geographically to Iceland, so I’m really in the heart of the ash.  Come to think of it, that’s not really funny at all.  I’m trying to look on the bright side of the whole situation, and I’ve been able to visit friends in Galway that I wouldn’t have had time to see had I got on my flight days ago like I planned.

But enough writing.  Here’s a video update that explains my situation.