Awake, showered, packed, email and blogs all read. Taxi due in about half an hour. I should be on Twitter on and off during the journey. Aside from that, London here I come.

As you may have noticed from Twitter, I am now back home in Darkest Somerset. Dublin was a blast, and also a really nice city. There were some great shops and restaurants they I wish I had been able to find the time to investigate. Maura recommended a really nice-looking museum that I also didn’t get to. I didn’t even have any Guinness. Hopefully some of this will be rectified when I go back for P-Con next month.

I was particularly taken by the use of an old church as a tourist information center. Maybe it is a CofE place that the Irish have re-purposed.

Talking of tourism and P-Con, I’ll do a more detailed post about getting to the Central once I have processed some video I shot there.

Anyway, I liked the city very much, and I’m also homeless right now. I bought an Irish paper on the plane back, and rents seem a little higher than they are here, but it is all complicated by the exchange rate. Hmm. Possibilities.

So here I am in another airport departure lounge. Yes, they do all look pretty much the same. Still, if I am going to be stuck in Darkest Somerset for a while, I figured I might as well find out what the local escape route had to offer. While this is a fairly small airport, it does have international connections, and not just cheap flights to Europe. Continental flies to New York from here. Of course I’d have to change to get to San Francisco, so I’m probably still better off going to London and flying United.

Possibly of more interest is the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. That’s a Star Alliance service, and I’m betting that you can connect from there to Helsinki. I shall investigate that later. In the meantime, as there doesn’t appear to be anything urgent on the email, I think I shall take a wander round. I shall check into Twitter from the phone every so often.

Today I am heading off to Dublin. RyanAir permitting, I shall be at the Amanda Palmer concert (probably a little late) tonight and at the Neil Gaiman / Amanda Palmer reading tomorrow. As Ireland is a foreign country it will cost me an arm and a leg to use my iPhone while I am there, but I hope to get wi-fi access a few times during the trip. Posting will be sparse until Wednesday evening.

I’m off to London shortly. I’ll be there until mid-day Thursday. Mostly I shall be busy, but I shall try to check in as often as I can.

It was a beautiful day for traveling. The sky was blue, the roads were clear, it was neither too hot nor too cold. We made excellent time, breezing through the MacArthur Maze and Cordelia Junction. As I mentioned on Twitter, we passed a Well Fargo stagecoach along the way. It was on a flatbed being towed by a truck. Kevin thinks there was some sort of event in San Francisco yesterday. It was probably on its way back to Sacramento Old Town.

Our first task of the weekend was to deliver presents to Kevin’s family, which we duly did, meeting up with his mother and her husband at his grandfather’s house. The kittens are somewhat bigger now, but are still recognizably kittens. Sadly they are still very skittish.

Now we get a chance to catch up on email and the blogosphere before meeting up with Gigi for dinner.

Well, I am home at last, but it has not been the best of days. Here’s the full story.

My original plan to have brunch at The Court of the Two Sisters was squashed because they were full – I think the courtyard was closed due to the weather, so they had a lot less seating available. The backup plan for beignets at Cafe du Monde was also squashed because of a long queue. So I ended up having breakfast at Starbucks in the hotel, where I did at least get to see the city’s Christmas parade going up Canal Street.

Talking of the hotel, I was hoping to have a photo of the nice “Santa in canoe pulled by gators” display that they had, but my digital camera died.

I had to get a cab to the airport because apparently the hotel shuttles book up 24 hours in advance. That was fine, except, as you doubtless all know by now the plane had technical problems. After much waiting around and confusion I was finally sent over to Continental in another terminal. In the process my number came up on the TSA lottery and I had all the joys of additional screening.

Continental’s flights had plenty of room and ran to time. Also their terminal at Houston turned out to be very nice, though Houston does still make those silly announcements about arresting you if you crack a joke. I bought myself a box of truffles. The burrito I had a Pappasito’s was a bit squidgy, and therefore messy to eat, but it tasted fabulous.

Eventually I got to SFO about 3 hours late. I should give a note of thanks here to Xavier, my teddy-neck-pillow, whose gentle embrace helped me to spend all but about an hour of my time in the air asleep. That was essential if I was going to have to drive home. Xavier would like to apologize to Daniel Abraham whose fine book, An Autumn War got a lot less reading than it might otherwise have done.

Of course they lost my bags, and those of everyone else United routed onto Continental. The ladies in the Continental baggage claim say that the bags are still with United and will be delivered to SFO tomorrow. There’s a web-based tracking system for them, which is a vast improvement.

Thankfully the van was exactly where Kevin had left it and I was able to drive home without incident. Now I am going to get some sleep.