A sort of steady one-upmanship here in the aviation world. Who has the longest commercial flight in the world? At the moment, it’s Dallas-Forth Worth to Sydney, at 16 hours and 55 minutes. By February 2016, it will be Dubai to Panama City, at 17 hours and 30 minutes. But not long after that … […]

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Gasoline price hikes always come as something of a shock in the Gulf, where many countries are pretty much floating on oil and consumers expect to pay very little at the pump. Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading producer of oil and gas prices there have always been cheap — about 59 cents a gallon, […]

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For most of my life, airline food was mocked and derided. “Cold” … “rubbery” … “tasteless” … “inedible”. We ate airline food because it came with the ride. It was distributed, free. No, really. (And I realize some Millennials have never seen anything more tasty than peanuts given away/sold. Or, worse, a bag of mini-pretzels.) […]

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Most major movies made in Hollywood make their way to the UAE, sometimes opening on the same day as they do in the U.S. But certain movies … Well, you can’t really plan on seeing them in Abu Dhabi. Which is why we spent two of the past three evenings in Southern California theaters. The […]

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A lesson on how bad the drought has been in the “Golden (tilting towards brown) State”. It rained here today, and Californians were more joyful, verging on giddy, in reacting to it than are Emiratis, for whom rain is even more rare. We were on Fletcher Avenue, behind Griffith Park in Los Angeles, when we […]

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It is unusual to see private homes built right on the sand of the Pacific Ocean, in California. As is the one in which we are staying. It is even more unusual to sit inside that home and watch hundreds of recreational vehicles roll past on their way to the Ocean Dunes State Vehicular Recreation […]

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Monday, the scorched and dry hills. Today, the dramatic cliffs and crashing surf of Montana de Oro State Park. The latter is pretty much immune to the California drought — and it made for a very fine Central Coast hike.

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We went on a short hike today, above Lopez Lake, about 10 miles inland on Highway 227 from Pismo Beach. California is suffering through a drought of historical proportions, and it is particularly noticeable here in San Luis Obispo County, where the hills often remain green right through the summer. (As opposed to Southern California, […]

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Not all of California is overrun, and we drove up the coast today to luxuriate in that part of it. The Central Coast, it is called. And it is spectacular. Rolling hills, green, when a drought is not going on. Home to hundreds of vineyards. About an hour north of Santa Barbara; about three hours […]

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Day 1 in the Southern California visit and it seems like it always did, except more so. More people, more cars, more money needed to go grocery shopping. Looking at four lanes of traffic at a standstill on the southbound 5, and it’s not even noon, and it is hard to imagine I dealt with […]

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