liability may be limited by the warsaw convention

GUADEC was great fun. It was good to see old friends and meet new ones. I was especially happy to finally meet David and the other HAL hackers like Kay and Kristian.

I took a good number of photos but none was all that good. Norway was nice but the 20 hours of sunlight really messes with your head. One night we wandered out for dinner at 11 pm — which was challenging — and the sun was setting. Afterward we went to the pubs and when we left at 3 am the sun was rising. Crazy.

On the way back they lost my luggage. They put the wrong baggage tag on it, and it didn’t match my ticket. In Oslo a woman came on board and asked me for my baggage claim ticket, and wrote it down. Then she left. Then she came back on about 5 minutes later and asked me for it again. I noticed that she had crossed out the number on my ticket. She wrote it down again, then hestiated, and asked if she could “borrow” the ticket. I gave it to her. A few more minutes passed and then they closed the cabin door.

So no surprise that when I get to Newark my bags aren’t there. In waiting for my bags and the totally crappy layout of that airport I missed my connecting flight to Boston. I was able to get on the next flight an hour later on standby, but due to storms we were grounded for about 30 minutes. Once we got up in the air we were delayed further and circled Providence for about an hour and a half. What was supposed to be a 40 minute flight ended up being two and a half hours.

I was totally out of clean clothes and worried that my bag wouldn’t show up before my trip to Ireland this week, so I went out and bought some new clothes. Fortunately my bag showed up on Saturday.

jumping over cars with motorcyles is strictly prohibited

Oh yeah, there were these benches with all these creepy things carved into it. Here are a couple of my favorites: