Live from Austin!

I woke up on board a 747. Once I’d remembered why, I looked at my watch, and estimated we were an hour or two from landing. I took a drink of water. Soon the BA flight attendants started bringing in breakfast, and I gently prodded the spouse awake. Against all probability, I had managed to get 2 or 3 hours of pretty decent sleep onboard an airplane. Soon we landed at Heathrow Terminal 4.

As we disembarked from the plane, I started to hear raised voices. It turned out that some genius in the UK’s Department for Transport had set new airline luggage policies.

Flying in to the UK, you can carry one piece of hand luggage, and one personal item such as a laptop. However, flying out of the UK, you can only carry the one piece of hand luggage. The piece de resistance: the restrictions apply even if you’re only changing planes at Heathrow.

Hence numerous business travelers had flown in with a travel bag containing valuable or fragile items, and a laptop bag containing their laptop. They were now arguing with airport security because they couldn’t fit the laptop bag inside their other bag, and didn’t want to trust the laptop or their carry-on to the tender mercies of the baggage throwers. And I can quite understand–I often travel with a carry-on bag containing SLR and lenses.

Still, it wasn’t our problem, so we strolled past the angry people and headed to immigration. Thanks to my European passport, I could waltz into the fast line. The woman who checked my passport was wearing a Muslim jilbāb, and the situation struck me as slightly ironic.

True to the promise, our luggage got priority, and hit the carousel first. We found our way through customs, and my parents were waiting to meet us. Mother was clearly very excited. Hugs were exchanged, and we got into the Range Rover for the trip to Bournemouth.

England was much as I remembered it. The countryside is not unlike the Texas Hill Country, though of course it lacks the cactus and vultures, and the trees are different species. The buildings are the main difference–old, often dirty, and made of brick.

Bournemouth isn’t home, and I don’t think it ever will be. However, pretty much my whole family decided to up and move there after I had left for the USA, and they love it. It’s like they’ve lived their all their lives. So the place gives me a strange feeling, as though Buckinghamshire is just an implanted false memory.

It’s certainly a nice enough town. But in spite of recent changes, it’s still a bit of a sleepy seaside resort, and not the kind of place I’d want to live. And since it’s the most expensive place in the UK for property, we couldn’t afford to live there anyway.

The sea is cold. After a week or so, when the weather warmed up, there were people swimming in it; but I wasn’t going to be one of them. However, we did walk along the sand, and splash around in the surf a bit.

Update: There’s a happy end to the story. My dad managed to get hold of a BT Voyager 2100 ADSL router. For some reason it didn’t pick up the DNS settings; however, once I helped him configure DNS on his Mac, everything worked. In particular, iChat AV worked fine for video chat, with no configuration needed on the router.

So: if you’re looking for a good Mac-compatible router to use with BT ADSL, a Voyager 2100 will probably float your boat.

And it was extremely cool to video chat with my parents. Most of the rest of the family live in Bournemouth too, so I’ll doubtless get to talk to them as well over the next few weeks.

Update 2: Someone else with a Netopia wrote to tell me that he eventually got it to work, via the following steps:

1. I switched off uPnP on the router (iChat loading actually caused the router to crash/reboot with uPnP enabled!).

2. I switched the firewall setting to “Low” (although “Off” works, as well)

3. I’m not positive it was necessary, but I also upgraded the router firmware to 7.5 (from the Netopia site).

4. I left in place the various iChat port-forwarding settings.

Check his site for more info.

Previously:

We got the parents online from the Mac, but their router doesn’t seem to want to do the port forwarding thing, even when configured to do so. (With the Mac configured as DMZ, I still can’t ping them.)

The router that doesn’t work is a Netopia 3347NWG-VGx, in case anyone out there is considering buying one and finds this page.

• The trouble with being a goth is, you can’t be a goth at a seaside resort like Bournemouth. It just looks silly. Trust me on this.

• I notice stupidity is being imported from America. I saw a letter in The Guardian where the author, apparently serious, refered to himself as an “African-Briton”.

• Speaking of which, when did The Guardian start carrying ads for phone sex lines and hot bi action?!

England seemed much more bearable this time. I think there were several reasons for this. Firstly, now that my family have all up and moved to Bournemouth, there are actually things to do when I’m visiting. About the only thing worth doing in Hyde Heath was getting a lift to Amersham station and a train to London.

The second thing is that it was summer, which means the rain was slightly less frequent and it was pleasantly warm. There’s definitely something to be said for visiting at times other than Christmas.

Another bonus is that I love the sea. I could probably just sit on the beach and listen to it for an hour.

The final factor is that I hadn’t been back to England in three years. My mother didn’t even begin to annoy me for the first week. Edd seems to have taken over the responsibility of arguing with dad, so I had no choice but to get on with everyone.

Bournemouth is still very much the traditional English seaside resort, complete with beach huts, pier, and chip shops. The town center has streets of shops radiating away from a central park, with a balloon ride for sightseers. West of the town center, where my parents live, the hills almost become cliffs and there are all kinds of excitingly rugged chines suitable for geocaching.

To the east is the New Forest, so called because it was planted on the orders of Henry VIII, who felt that England needed a ready supply of timber for wartime use. Obviously for me, one of the high points of the visit was the weaselarium. It’s officially called the Otter, Owl and Wildlife Park, but there’s a clear emphasis on mustelids. Oh, yes, there are plenty of owls I suppose, and some deer… but they have weasels galore. American river otters, European river otters, Asian small-clawed otters, mink, pine martens, stoats, ferrets, polecats, and even a couple of badgers. I think I can safely say you won’t see more varieties of weasel in one place. The animals all seemed to have plenty of space, too. Inside there was a definite musky weasel smell, which we began to recognize from time to time while out walking in places like Hengistbury Head.

Being away for July 4th, we still managed to see fireworks, but without the attendant nauseating warmongering and overpatriotic fervour. The evenings were warm enough to wander the beach, mostly. All told, a pleasant vacation.