Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau Relaxo
One trip in the last few weeks a quick two-night stay in Jacksonville, FL, the birthplace of the CEO in case you were keeping track.
The hotel was the Homewood Suites Hilton Garden Inn location. Hilton has embraced a strategy that combines two of its brands into one single structure. Shared pool, shared fitness centers, and shared parking lots but with an entrance for the Homewood Suites side and one for the Hilton Garden Inn. Honestly, this does make sense as often time there will be a Hilton Garden with a completely separate Homewood Suites across the parking lot, so why not share some resources, and I’m guessing some employees well. The first time I ran into this was in Brunswick, GA last year.
As far as COVID the riot shield across the check-in desk was gone, and very few of the employees were wearing masks. Not sure what the daily housekeeping situation was as I hung the “Don Not Disturb” sign on the door as soon as I entered the room. That being said, I believe that there was some sort of housekeeping available as the elevator had a sign posted letting me know that there was now cashless tipping available by scanning a QR code that was in my room. My prediction is that this cashless offering will disappear in less than 12 months.
Jacksonville food consisted of two stops.
The first was the River and Post.
Here’s a pro tip, if you choose to sit on the rooftop the view is spectacular, but the menu is limited, so opt for downstairs seating. Start the meal with fresh raw oysters and calamari, and pair that with a Bulleit Proof, their version of an Old Fashioned. My main course was simple, crab cakes, creamy mashed potatoes, and this wonderfully fresh sauteed spinach.
My next stop was on the coast at North Beach Fish Camp. While the CEO was born in a seaside town beyond shrimp she’s not much of a seafood fan, so I took full advantage of this trip.
My choice was their trifecta seafood basket, deviled crash, fried oysters, fried clam strips, hush puppies. french fries and cole slaw. This was lunch, and while this is an S-Ton of food I’m here to tell you that I was part of the clean basket club.
When it comes to fried food, especially fried seafood it’s very easy for everything to taste the same. At the North Beach Fish Camp, this was not the case as the clams tasted like clams and the oysters tasted like oysters.
All this food needed some brew and that’s where Aardwolf Brewing Company comes into the picture. The location is a repurposed tile distributor, so the locations outside is eclectic, to say the least, and one of the brewmasters has a story to go along with the location being an old tile factory.
This evening my choice was their Hop Oddity weighing in at 5.8% ABV.
The J-Town food and brews have been noted so it’s time to move on to the August crazy travel roundup.
Let's open with this. It seems that the current trend is quite quitting. If you’ve never heard of quite quitting here’s to 30,000” view. It’s where you're not outright quitting your job, but you're quitting the idea of going above and beyond.
From WWAY we give you this, Air traffic controllers say co-pilot ‘jumped’ from plane in Raleigh.Short of being a skydiver, I see no reason in jumping from a completely good plane, unless…. It’s damaged. And I have a parachute
Apparently, that’s what happened. It’s been unclear exactly how or why the co-pilot Charles Hew Crooks exited the small damaged cargo plane because he didn’t have the aforementioned parachute.
Sadly, his body was found in a backyard about 30 miles south of Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
And the damaged aircraft managed to pull off a successful landing.
Carrying on with the theme of successful crash landings. From the Orlando Weekly, I give you Video shows plane crashing into Orlando area road near UCF. UCF is one of our many local colleges and UCF means you can’t finish. Hello, 6th-year senior.
The plane was on a maintenance flight at the time of the hard landing, citing engine failures as the cause. Colin also said he was in the plane at the time of the crash.
The pilot, Remy Colin, said “It was 4:00 over University (Boulevard). Worst traffic. There was absolutely nowhere to land,” “My choice was a lake or the road. I see a stretch of 300 feet. There was one red light. There were 100 cars on one side, and 100 cars on the other side, so I had oncoming traffic. I had a stretch of maybe 100 feet, and I said, ‘I’m gonna land it there.’”. Which is exactly what Remy Colin did.
The link in the show notes will take you to the video, and in this case, UCF just might stand for “You Can’t Fly, but you can land”.
As a child, most of our vacations were road trips, thus my love for a road trip. As with most families, any of our shenanigans were met with my mother or father turning their head and uttering the veiled threat of, “Don’t make me turn this car around”. Veiled threat as in after prepaying for hotels and whatnot Scrooge McDuck and his wife wasn’t about to forfeit any of their hard-earned money.
That brings us to our next story from DailyDot - ‘Quit sending naked pictures’: Pilot says he’ll turn plane around after passenger AirDrops nudes.
In the June crazy travel roundup, we talked about Creepy McCreeperton airdropping pictures of his twig and the accompanying berries to anyone on his recent Southwest flight.
The pilot responded with the announcement if passengers continue to AirDrop nude photos to other passengers while the plane is on the ground, he will “have to pull back into the gate, everybody’s going to have to get off. We’re going to have to get security involved.”
Followed by, “Vacation is going to be ruined,” and then “Whatever that AirDrop thing is, quit sending naked pictures, and let’s get yourselves to Cabo.”
We’ve talked about this before, many many times…. Women don’t want to see pictures of random dudes' junk, pen-is, member, twig, or their berries. If they did they’d let you know.
Remember women are wired differently the men.
The video in the show notes has had almost 2 million views.
The tip-in was Israel arrests 9 for 'AirDrop' of crash images aboard plane.
Mid-August View From the Wing posted - Passenger Sprawls Across Row Of Seats Smoking A Cigarette, Only Gets 15 Day Airline Ban.
I’m not a marketer, but I’ve been told, that the first rule of marketing is to find the marketing message that most resonates with your target market.
United Airlines was the first to create a nonsmoking section on the back of a plane in 1971. As if smoke knew not to float to the back of the plane.
U.S. airlines were still allowed to offer onboard smoking up until 2000…. I never knew.
The View From The Wing post noted - Recently a passenger on SpiceJet in India was banned for 15 days – that’s seriously all that happened – after being videotaped smoking a cigarette while sprawled out across a row of seats. Given the way this was videotaped, making a clear point of showing the brand of the man’s pants, it seems likely this was staged for brand publicity.
Yep, brand publicity and I’m guessing the second rule of marketing is - bad publicity is good publicity. Even a child knows that you can’t smoke in a store, on a bus, or even on an airplane.
Curious, if it had been a cigar would it have been a 30-day ban?
What do we say about nudity? There are two types, good nudity, and bad nudity. This post from Live An Let’s Fly falls under bad nudity. Half-Naked Woman Storms Cockpit Shouting “Allahu Akbar” And Warning Of Explosion.
According to Live And Let’s Fly these are the Cliff Noyes - She ripped her clothes off. She ran for the cockpit and screamed “Allahu Akbar.” That phrase, known as the Takbir, means “God is the greatest.”
Demanding to be let into the cockpit, she said if she was not let in there would “be an explosion and everybody is going to die.” She also claimed her parents were members of ISIS, a militant Sunni group also known as The Islamic State or Daesh.
Next - Flight attendants advised her to stop, but apparently could not stop her. A passenger named Phillip O’Brien jumped to the rescue and secured her to a chair (a flight attendant helped).
The post concluded with this - The woman now faces a prison sentence of up to five years as well as a hefty fine. No video of the scene has yet emerged.
The story lacks any call to action as to why the nudity and charging of the cockpit took place, but it makes for that with some solid comments.
Stuart posted
Flight attendants: “We are first responders and here only for your safety.”
Cut to scene: Passengers rolling their eyes.
But Too Many may have summed the incident up with this - I get a feeling a woman who strips down and screams Allah Akbar isn’t actually Muslim.
It’s been several years since I’ve flown Delta, but when I was based out of Atlanta I was a Delta fan-boy. I never made it to Delta Diamond, but I was Delta gold for years. With Delta gold, I was able to always board early so I was always able to have an overhead bin above my seat for my luggage. Plus early on I was able to get a first-class upgrade about 40% of the time. Once Delta introduced those branded American Express credit cards that percentage dropped.
So here’s a quick question for you, beginning January 2023 how many boarding zones will Delta have? 10 -
* Pre-Boarding
* Active Duty Military
* Delta One or First Class
* Diamond Medalion Members
* Delta Premium Select
* Early Access (Car Seats & Strollers)
* Delta Comfort+
* Sky Priority
* Main Cabin 1
* Main Cabin 2
* Main Cabin 3
* Basic Economy
So the big change to the boarding zone lineup is that Delta diamond no longer boards with first-class. Not sure of Delta’s strategy as no diamond member would be willing to purchase a first-class ticket just in order to board earlier.
Another crazy twist to this is that if you’re flying out of a Delta hub, especially Atlanta, I have personally witnessed the majority of passengers being Delta diamond which created yet another boarding zone bottleneck as 40 or 50 passengers queuing up to board the flight.
Stay tuned because as 2023 gets closer this will become a topic of conversation for Delta devotees.
If you ever meet a baby road warrior, I’ve decided that a baby road warrior is someone that’s been a weekly business traveler for less than 3 years, all baby road warriors will be able to tell you the total number of flights they have taken as well as the number of nights they’ve spent in a hotel room…. The reason, is they’re looking for that next status level. After three years you keep track of the status, gold, diamond titanium.
If you ask me the number of flights I’ve taken in the last 22 years my guess would be at least 700. Of those 700+ flights, I’ve never once experienced an aborted landing nor even what I would call a rough landing.
This actually happened in July but didn’t hit the light of day until August. This story was all over the Internet, but here’s the gist of it - Southwest attendant suffers broken back in hard landing.
From the Associated Press posted,
A Southwest Airlines flight attendant suffered a compression fracture to a vertebra in her upper back during a hard landing last month in California.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the impact of landing was so hard that the flight attendant thought the plane had crashed. She felt pain in her back and neck and could not move, and was taken to a hospital where she was diagnosed with the fracture.
The safety board completed its investigation without saying what caused the hard landing.
As they say, fact is stranger than fiction as this flight attendant was the only one on board that reported any sort of an issue.
Take it from someone with a destroyed spinal column, I feel for this flight attendant.
In last month’s crazy travel roundup we talked about Mr. It’s All About Me who proposed to his girlfriend on the tarmac of the Atlanta Hartsfield airport. I hope Mr. It’s All About Me is listening because here’s how that proposal just might end.
Inconsolable' man returned from Heathrow loo to find fiancée ran off with bags and £5k.
The man had "fallen head over heels" for the woman and proposed the day before they were due to fly to Rome to get married, but she vanished at Heathrow Airport when he went to the toilet.
Here are the Cliff Notes -
The pair, in their 40s, told check-in staff at Heathrow they were flying to Rome to tie the knot after getting engaged a day earlier.
But when the man went to the toilets and left the woman with their suitcases she disappeared and took everything with her, The Sun reports.
I’ve watched multiple episodes of MTV’s Catfish, apparently, this bloke didn’t. I doubt she took an earlier flight, but hopefully, he had thrown an AirTag in his luggage.
There you have it, the August crazy travel roundup.
If you want detailed show notes, links and pictures head over to podpage.com/travel-stories/
Leave a message onAnchor, or shoot me an email atTravelFrick@gmail.com.
As I always say, travel safe, stay safe, and thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening.
