A Phone Upgrade and Driving Lessons

My sister, Lin, gave me a belated birthday present … an iPhone. We wondered if we were not the last people on Earth to have acquired one. Everywhere we go, we see people attached to their phones. Since we travel from country to country, we usually use a small Samsung and buy a new SIM card for it in each country … that is, if we feel we need a phone. When you don't know anyone and nobody knows you, it's kind of pointless to have a phone.

The Samsung is quite a utilitarian phone. One young person asked how old it was … he'd never seen one like it. Really? It's only four years old! We can use it make phone calls and send/receive texts. It's not a flashlight nor a camera and we can't access the internet with it. Sending texts is a chore. It's the old A-B-C variety where you scroll through and find the letter you need, click on it, then proceed to the next letter. There's no auto-correct (which I think is a plus), nor suggestions for how you might like to finish a word or sentence. But … it does make phone calls.

David has pretty much claimed the new phone. After all, only one person can use it at a time. He's the gadget guy. Lin has given us a brief tutorial on its operation and David's been working his way through all its many features, uploading our Yahoo address book, entering new phone numbers, etc. I've managed to answer the phone a couple of times and I've turned on the flashlight ... accidentally.

Along with the new phone came a new phone number which, of course, we haven't managed to memorize yet. Someone asked for the new number the other day and then had to show me how to find the number on the phone. We usually tape the number on the back of the phone, but David hadn't gotten around to doing it yet. We have a new number in each country, and we've never been anywhere long enough to learn our phone number in one country before moving on to a new one.

Whenever we're away for awhile and return to the USA, we're always surprised by what's new and trendy. For instance, we just learned that McDonalds now serves breakfast all day long. (Thank goodness, no need to rush to get there before 10:30.) Also, we can now monitor our phone calls on our TV (if we had one). I can set reminders, set up schedules and do lots of other things with the new iPhone … most of which we haven't discovered yet. 2016 will certainly be a year of exploration.

Having the iPhone has eliminated all sorts of frustration and it was indeed a splendid gift. Now we've just got to learn how to drive it. And I'm sure that in a few weeks, we'll no longer be able to function without it.

Our New Website...

with a little help from our friends

Our website, www.nineofcups.com, is becoming pretty antiquated, and we've come to the painful decision that we can't put off updating it any longer. We have a prototype of the new version, and are hoping we can enlist our friends to give us some feedback before we get too committed.

We started building our website in 2002, and the tools available at that time were pretty rudimentary. We were using a predecessor to Yahoo Sitebuilder which required an online connection to build each page … a real pain when we were paying by the minute for a verrrry slow connection at an internet cafe on some remote island. Then, we discovered Yahoo Sitebuilder. This gave us the capability of making updates and building new pages offline, then posting them to the website in batches.

Marcie took on the task of updating the website, and has been continually adding to it over the years. It now contains almost 300 pages. She has posted not only thousands of photos and the associated text documenting our travels, but dozens of “how-to's”, reprints of many of our articles, insights into the cruising life, a host of other photo collections and a miscellany of useful information.

We've continued to use Sitebuilder and have kept the same format all these years. Unfortunately, we are discovering more and more issues with our website. One problem is that Sitebuilder doesn't make it easy to construct a “mobile friendly” website, A page that looks good when viewed by a laptop is marginal when viewed on a tablet and totally garbled on a smart phone. To add insult to injury, we recently received an email from Google informing us that we would no longer be included in their searches if we didn't make our 300 pages mobile friendly.

Another problem is that a page that looks good on one browser often appears poorly formatted on another browser (or even a different version of the same browser, for that matter). The text often gets re-positioned behind a photo, for example. Marcie went through all of our webpages and reformatted each and every one one not too long ago, only to have the problem crop up again a few months later.

There were a number of other annoying issues with Sitebuilder, and so, we bit the bullet and decided to redo good old nineofcups.com. It would be great if there was a software package that would allow us to just import our old website and reformat it into something new and sleek, but this just isn't possible. We will have to manually cut and paste the contents of every page from the old format to our new format. This is obviously going to be a big job, something we might be able to get a large portion of done on our Atlantic crossing. Before we go to all that effort, however, we want to make damn sure we do it right.

After researching the available packages, we bought some new website software, and have started experimenting with new website templates. We figured out one we like and have constructed a few pages using it. Before we really jump into it and start converting those 300 pages, we thought we would pass it by you, our friends, and get your input.

If you go to our website, www.nineofcups.com, and click on the link on the right side of the webpage, it will take you to the new format. Alternatively, especially if you you want to check it out on a mobile device, click here.

We would really appreciate any feedback you have – good or bad. Did we miss something? Do you have suggestions? How can we do it better? Are there other similar websites that you really like and could recommend for aesthetics, ease of use, functionality or content? We're open to all suggestions. We'd love your input.

Los Angeles to Dubai

the long way to Durban

We stayed overnight at the LAX TraveLodge to avoid the hassle of an early morning 4-6 hour drive and car return in favor of a leisurely dinner, a good night's sleep and a no-stress shuttle ride to LAX's international departures terminal. It's a budget hotel and it suits our needs.  LAX is the second busiest airport in the USA, our shuttle driver informed us. Chicago O'Hare is #1 and Atlanta is #3. LAX always seems to be “under construction” and traffic is crazy like most airports.

The Theme Building is an iconic landmark of the airport. I remember having dinner at The Encounter Restaurant a couple of decades ago. It's got that spaceship look to it which makes it very noticeable and it revolved. Unfortunately, it closed in 2013. According to Wiki,  the building opened in 1961 and is an example of the Mid-Century modern-influenced design school known as "Googie" or "Populuxe." More info you couldn't live without.

We had checked in on-line and after showing our passports and checking our baggage, we were through Security in a matter of minutes. We wandered around the airport for awhile, taking advantage of the exercise while we could. The flight was on-time and we got a great view of Marina del Rey on departure.

We're pretty good travelers. We don't particularly enjoy long flights, but we tolerate them well. We can appreciate the inherent adventure in them. The 16-hour flight from LAX to Dubai can get pretty tiresome. You can only watch so many movies. My limit is about three. David tops out at five or so. He doesn't usually sleep. I doze. We read a bit; play a few games on our iPads. We were served several meals and snacks en route and the wine flowed freely enough. We're both usually “stove-up”, sore and lame, after being captive in our seats for so long, but we recover quickly. After 16 hours of captivity, walking through the airport and stretching is a pleasure.

When I traveled through Dubai on my way home from Boston last December, I took advantage of Emirate Airline's Dubai Connect option. We had a similar 14-hour layover in Dubai on our way from LAX and we took advantage of this option once again which allowed us a free hotel night including meals and shuttle transportation to and from the airport in Dubai. This time I had my captain with me to enjoy the amenities of the Copthorne Hotel which made it an even better respite. Heading to the hotel for a hot shower, dinner and a good night's sleep was like manna from heaven.

Last time through, my flight arrived late and Dubai was foggy. There wasn't much to see. This time, we actually had a couple of hours to spare and we briefly considered a possible night tour of the city. We talked ourselves out of it when we thought about sitting for another two hours in a van for the tour. We contented ourselves with looking at the hotel lobby shops … gold, camels and sand art.

Had we not been so keen on getting back to Nine of Cups, we might have opted for a couple days to explore Dubai, but that'll have to wait for another time. The best we got were views of the city from our 8th floor dirty hotel window the morning we departed.