More travelblogging: Houston, TX
So I didn’t think I’d be going back to Texas for a while, but apparently like half of our participant airlines live in some part of Texas or another. Which I guess makes sense, given the huge amounts of open, flat space with relatively light hurricane profiles, mild winters, and being in about the middle of the country…
So this trip, we went to Houston. Having seen Dallas before, I’m somewhat compelled to make direct comparisons. Both Houston and Dallas are absurdly sprawled-out. There’s literally miles of open space between anything and anything else… having access to a car is NOT optional in Texas.
Houston seems a little “greener” than Dallas, from what I was seeing. At least, it seemed like it was home to a little bit more foliage and a little less sandy soil, but overall I’m guessing it’s probably not a whole lot different climate-wise.
In downtown Houston, we got dinner at this place called Cabo, which was apparently like 2 blocks from the hotel Kennedy stayed in the night before he was killed, or something like that. Cabo itself had pretty excellent food, looked like they specialized in tex-mex style seafood, but the service was pretty crap all around.
Downtown Houston is fairly nice, with an interesting trolley/light rail system that serves a decent chunk of the city, and a couple of interesting sights, but there’s a lot of one-way street action, and a lot of weird signage and weird traffic rules near the trolley. We didn’t get to see a whole lot of the sights or wander around at all, because right when we finished dinner it started absolutely POURING. By the time we got back to the hotel we were under a tornado watch, that progressed to a warning by the mid evening.
We also went north, still in what I think is considered Houston, but was really just sprawled out suburban space north of the airport. Caught a restaurant called Pappasito’s, which apparently has locations all over Texas, and one north of Atlanta. Excellent food, great Fajitas especially. Everyone was pretty happy with it… so yeah, highly recommended. Service was good too.
On the airports front, Houston International Airport is nicer than DFW for aesthetics, but not as stylized as Phoenix Sky Harbor or as airy as Dulles. The layout’s a bit odd, and the security line sucked more than Dulles security, but it was ok.
Atlanta International Airport blows, though. It’s basically a long linear building with all the different terminal areas in a straight line, front and back of the building, with the runways and taxiways all on one side of it. So when you land, you end up taxiing for like 20 minutes to get to your gate, it seems like. The decor isn’t as bad as DFW, but isn’t particularly inviting either.
For the flight info, we did two hops both times. Dulles to Atlanta, we rode a Canadair CRJ-900, which is relatively tiny, a 2-2 layout with a total of about 60 seats. Seats were on the smaller side at 17.5 width 31 pitch, but the middle arm flips up, getting an inch or two extra if your seatmate’s not also a large person like me. The Atlanta->Houston jump was an MD88, which is a bit larger but the seating frankly blows (17 inch width, 30 inch pitch). I got moved to an empty row to get some extra space, but was between the engines and couldn’t see out the windows as a result.
The trip back, both hops were on MD90′s, which are basically MD88′s with the layout reversed. Same deal on the seating: it blows, but can be alleviated a bit by flipping up the armrests. No legroom for someone my size, but probably fine for someone smaller. The MD90 had the added bonus of tv screens that flip down from above the seats, and I guess you can catch the audio for them from your armrest, but I didn’t really care to.
The return trip, both our original flight and the connection were delayed pretty heavily by the same weather system that prevented us from exploring or doing interesting stuff, and by the replacement of a malfunctioning sensor, so I got to spend a LOT of time waiting around in both IAH and ATL. Wasn’t particularly fun, let me just say.
The install itself went decently. Not too great, but not too terrible either. We were pulling out old equipment and putting in new stuff, but even though it was a square-hole netapp rack, the depth was set too shallow to use the Dell rapid rails. We worked around it with cage nuts and rack-mountable shelves and some netapp custom rails for the storage arrays, and arrived at a better end than we did back in Phoenix, but … there’s always something, you know? Also, a Netapp standard rack is slightly too shallow to comfortably accommodate dell poweredge 1950′s with infiniband cables sticking out the back, unless you put the curved front door on the back or leave it open.
I tell you, there’s always something.