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Some you may have noticed that there weren’t any posts on Traveling For Miles on Thursday and Friday last week and, as I’ve had a few emails asking what’s up, I thought I’d quickly explain what I’ve been doing and the reason for a few days silence on the blog.
I generally don’t post to the blog on weekends but if there’s ever a day during the week when at least a few posts go out on Traveling for Miles there’s always a very good reason….and laziness generally isn’t one of them! 🙂
I do a quite a bit of traveling (by most people’s standards) and not all of it gets mentioned on the blog because it’s not always interesting or even useful. There’s only a certain number of times you can review a transatlantic flight on an airline you’ve reviewed quite a few times in the past and uneventful short-haul flights on airlines I’ve reviewed before aren’t really what most readers want to read about….so just because it doesn’t get mentioned doesn’t mean that I’m not putting in some serious hours on one airline or another.
Right now I’m on a trip and I’m going to break with my usual policy of not mentioning where in the world I am by saying that, as I type this, I’m in Rio de Janeiro and I’m looking out at Copacabana Beach.
I’ve had quite a busy travel and work schedule of late and, on Thursday, I was up at 4am to catch a flight to Madrid from where I connected on to Rio de Janeiro.
I was full of great intentions and planned on getting a lot of blogging done on my two flights on the way to Rio but, unusually for me, that’s not how things panned out.
I was exhausted.
After all my recent flights the 4am wake-up call wasn’t what I needed and I quickly found myself falling asleep on my London – Madrid flight…so no work got done on that part of the journey.
I didn’t have a particularly long stopover in Madrid so no work got done there (although I did get some reasonable photos of the airport and Iberia aircraft for future blogs)…..
……and, on the long-haul sector between Madrid and Rio, I was a lot less productive than I would normally be.
I managed to take all the pictures and notes I’ll need to write a review of Iberia’s A330-200 Business Class and I also managed to finally write up a review of the London Marriott Canary Wharf (which will appear on TFM later today)…but that was it.
The flat-bed was calling my name and my body was demanding recovery time so I slept on a daytime flight for the first time in years.
I arrived into Rio in the evening and got to my hotel by around 8pm…and I was feeling ok.
Check-in didn’t take very long and I even managed to get some blog admin done before tiredness took over….so yet more time went by without any outwardly visible work got done!
On Friday, when I’d normally sit down and write 6 or 7 posts for TFM, I took a full-day (9 hour) tour of Rio as, with Carnival in full flow, Saturday and Sunday would be horrendously busy days to try to see the sights – last Saturday visitors to the famous ‘Christ the Redeemer’ statue had wait-times of over 2 hours!
I did manage to do a bit of blog work towards the end of Friday (you’ll see some of it appear today) but it turns out that a full day tour of Rio in 100+ degree heat can be quite energy sapping….so Friday evening wasn’t as productive as it may have been.
I finally got some work done over the weekend so you should see normal service resume from today onwards…but I still had time to experience my first Rio Carnival.
Wow. Just…..wow.
The locals here have an energy I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world (and they’re a little bit nuts too) and that leads to a city with a Carnival vibe that’s almost indescribable – the finals of the Samba parade started at 9pm and continued past 5am the following morning!
I’ll pull together a brief piece with my thoughts on Rio and post it to the blog later this week so I won’t go into details now…but it was definitely an experience well worth having.
So that’s it. That’s what I’ve been up to and that’s why the blog went quiet towards the end of last week.
Thanks to those who emailed asking what I was doing (now you know) and, for future reference, if TFM goes quiet during the week, there are generally only two reasons why this may be:
- I’m traveling without Wi-Fi
- I’m exhausted and need a break.
There will be quite a bit of (1) coming up in the summer but hopefully there won’t be any more (2) for a while….although I’m not getting any younger so I’m not making any promises! 🙂
Enjoy your trip!