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San Francisco is epically beautiful, and from my sweet third-floor apartment I have a clear view of the sunrise through bay windows. As I fell asleep last night I listened to someone playing clarinet in the distance. Today I took Bella to the beach and she romped around in the sand in the view of the Golden Gate bridge. On Ocean Beach the surfers made hay. For breakfast I sat outside with Bella and had a great chicken quesedilla at a restaurant 50 meters from my apartment.
The flight was uneventful but very long and uncomfortable due to The Rash.
The Lufthansa A340-600 was a nice airplane (I've never seen a shabby Lufthansa plane - they always seem almost new), but the in-flight entertainment system doesn't have too many options; they had to reboot it, too, during the flight, a 20-minute process in which you can watch the device download a bootloader via X-modem (!!!!) over a serial port, then download a Windows CE image over TFTP... The best IFE I've experienced recently has been on American airlines - the user interface is terribly slow, but the catalog is good - I watched a whole season of House of Cards on my last transatlantic flight (On US Airways but they have the same IFE system).
An advantage of a non-US carrier is that there is plenty of free booze (they come around offering an after-dinner Bailey's or brandy, etc).
Bella was a good travel dog and received some compliments while we were waiting for our luggage at SFO. It turns out that transatlantic travel with a small dog is pretty easy. Just as when I took Bella to Germany in the first place, again this time nobody looked at her paperwork. Paying the fee for an in-cabin pet (€70) also seems to be on the honor system.
Next time, though, maybe I'll ask someone to meet me at the airport -- piloting 100 lbs of luggage and a small dog through immigration, customs, airtrain, rental car, key pickup, and carrying-luggage-upstairs while exhausted and uncomfortable is not very fun. (All hail be unto Global Entry, I have definitely gotten my money's worth out of that service. And thank $diety for free and plentiful luggage carts in the international arrivals baggage claim at SFO.)
The flight was uneventful but very long and uncomfortable due to The Rash.
The Lufthansa A340-600 was a nice airplane (I've never seen a shabby Lufthansa plane - they always seem almost new), but the in-flight entertainment system doesn't have too many options; they had to reboot it, too, during the flight, a 20-minute process in which you can watch the device download a bootloader via X-modem (!!!!) over a serial port, then download a Windows CE image over TFTP... The best IFE I've experienced recently has been on American airlines - the user interface is terribly slow, but the catalog is good - I watched a whole season of House of Cards on my last transatlantic flight (On US Airways but they have the same IFE system).
An advantage of a non-US carrier is that there is plenty of free booze (they come around offering an after-dinner Bailey's or brandy, etc).
Bella was a good travel dog and received some compliments while we were waiting for our luggage at SFO. It turns out that transatlantic travel with a small dog is pretty easy. Just as when I took Bella to Germany in the first place, again this time nobody looked at her paperwork. Paying the fee for an in-cabin pet (€70) also seems to be on the honor system.
Next time, though, maybe I'll ask someone to meet me at the airport -- piloting 100 lbs of luggage and a small dog through immigration, customs, airtrain, rental car, key pickup, and carrying-luggage-upstairs while exhausted and uncomfortable is not very fun. (All hail be unto Global Entry, I have definitely gotten my money's worth out of that service. And thank $diety for free and plentiful luggage carts in the international arrivals baggage claim at SFO.)
