Don’t go with one computer Even though I was the only one on the road  working, we found one computer not enough to handle the live travel blogging.  A netbook, like the one we own, would probably have been enough.

Do store at least one credit card separately. We carry three cards when traveling.  It was a lifesaver that we had put one card (with some cash) separately in our suitcase.  When my wallet got stolen, we still had one that we could use.  In retrospect, I would have kept a spare Visa or Mastercard instead. The American Express wasn’t as useful as we hoped.

Don’t forget to phone your bank and credit cards before you leave. We did this for the Middle East, but forgot to do this for Mexico.  After the great Mexican wallet theft we had to begin taking a lot of money out of ATM’s. Bank of America got worried and shut off the ATM card. It took a few nerve-wracking hours to get it corrected and could have delayed us by three days because of bank holidays.

Do bring Starbucks Via instant on your next trip.  The Italian roast is really good, a thousand times better than Nescafe.  I’ve always felt like the giant jar of Nescafe at the breakfast table was taunting me, laughing at my helplessness and misfortune.   Now I have the last laugh.

Related posts:

1. Ten family travel tips from Mexico – part two.
2. Mexico travel plan part one: Ruins, Cenotes and Flamingos oh my!
3. The family trip to Mexico, Part two: Camping with kids in the jungle.

The E5C are very musical.  It’s one of the few in-ear headphones to have separate speakers for bass and treble.   You’ll be listening to them for hours on long flights and cheap headphones become fatiguing to the ear.  They make music more enjoyable.  You will hear music differently from your mp3 player, with a lot more detail than you ever knew was there.  Like most of us, you probably stopped listening to music years ago.   Plane flights are perfect for that, and these make it a joy.

These are not buzzy ‘noise canceling’ headphones.  They fit snugly in the ear and nearly eliminate outside noise enough that these double as earplugs for the red-eye.  I usually put them in as soon as I get on the plane even if not listening to music.  Shure supplies 12 different sizes and types of earpiece so everyone can get a comfortable fit.  I cut off the first node of the triple flange type and it’s perfect for me.

There are a few problems.  The first is the cost.  They retailed at $500 a few years ago, and are closer to $300 now, but they are still expensive.  Some folks will loose hair over headphones that are 4-5 times the cost of the player they are using.   That’s understandable.  But how long have your cheaper headphones lasted?  A year?  Two?  I’ve had this pair of E5C for 5 years and they show no signs of wear.  Shure can repair them too, if needed.

They have an unusual design where the wire goes over your ear to help hold it in place.  It’s uncomfortable at first, and you have to work with it to get a snug, comfy fit.  But once you figure out the way it works, you’ll never look back.

The replacement for the E5C is called the SE 530′s (cheaper at Amazon).  They maybe better, I don’t know.  I will probably never know because with that back-up pair I purchased, I may not buy headphones for another decade.

Related posts:

1. Travel Gear Review: Archos 7 portable media player
2. Review of Kings Dominion – no more kiddie rides for us.
3. Family Travel Moment: MV Captain Keith Tibbetts, Cayman Brac

I know, I know.  This post isn’t about travel.  This blog is about travel.   What gives?

I’m sneaking an interior design entry into a travel blog because the project gets a lot of interest from guests, contractors and friends.

Now that the work is (mostly) complete, I thought I would post some pictures and links. It’s a long tale, but I’ll keep it brief.

And I promise never to post off-topic entries in our blog again.  Yeah, right.

Why a steampunk dining room?

Trish and I have always liked the steampunk look, with its strong elements of wood, brass and lighting.  And we’re big fans of both steampunk and cyberpunk movies and novels.   But the connection goes beyond the aesthetic.  We also enjoy steampunk themes that explore the social controversies presented by science, the prospect of a dystopian future and technology fetishism.

We are not, however, into the do-it-yourself culture that some steampunk aficionados adopt.  In fact, if you are on a tight budget and/or hate Pottery Barn, stop reading here.  We admire the hardcore, but we aren’t purists.

First – a shout-out to another blog.  Many of the elements and ideas originated in a long-running and informative website,  The Steampunk Home, to whom we owe a big thank you.   I can’t remember precisely what drove me to Google ‘steampunk-home-decorating-blog.’ But one day I did and it was very helpful.  Lots of good ideas are cataloged there.

The project

We were first moved to redecorate after we had our interior colorfully painted.  The results were so surprisingly good that we saw our home in a new light.  It inspired us to redecorate our open-floor-plan downstairs into a series of vignettes:  a steampunk dining room, a modern naturalist living room and a space-age TV room.  We love them all, but the steampunk dining room was, by far, the largest project of the three.

The project was completely unplanned and took the better part of a year.   When I say unplanned, I should clarify that I always held an image in my head of what I wanted.  But the sequence of added elements was organic and ever-changing.  Everything was purchased on the internet.  I spent many long, but usually enjoyable hours searching for materials and items.  Almost no one uses the term ‘steampunk’ to describe their wares, as that has become cliche.

It wasn’t cheap either.  We spent about $10,000 to do it, including some labor, but not including a few pieces of art and decoration reused from other parts of the house.

In the end, we have a dramatic, attention-getting space that excites people when they enter the house.  Every evening, when I pass by on my way to bed, the lights glow softly and I smile.  It was definitely worth it.

Before, During and After:

Here are a few pictures to show the progression. The first photo is how it used to look when we used the dining area as a living room. The dog is our first Akita, Freida.   We apparently have just returned from Costco with cases of soda, lol. To the left of the photo are the bay windows. Directly in front is the old gas fireplace.

Next is a picture during the change from a different angle. It looked like an archeological dig in our home. For orientation, you are facing the bay windows and the the fireplace is on the right (but had been removed).

Here is the original perspective as it looks today, complete with our new Akita, Monty!

Our home:

Our house is a recently built neo-Victorian situated in an old neighborhood called Takoma Park outside Washington D.C.   There are many Victorian mansions in the area including a period-decorated farmhouse from 1890 next door.

The space:

We’ve always had trouble using the room because of the house’s open floor plan.  We call it a ‘room’, but really it’s just one third of a 60 x 20 foot open space that comprises half our main-floor.   From the time we moved in, one of our interior design challenges has been to divide that large space into smaller functional ‘rooms’ that were visually distinct even though there were no walls to separate.

After dozens of attempts using multiple arrangements, the large space is now a living room at one end, kids living area in the middle and the steampunk dining room at the other end.  I walk through that sequence in the next video starting with the living room space, done in a modern naturalist style. You then pass through the middle section where the kids area has a TV, toy shelves and little couches.  The steampunk dining room is at the far end.

The dining room design was particularly difficult, because in addition to the open side, the other three sides of the ‘room’ include a set of bay-windows, a staircase, and (originally) an ugly gas fireplace that we never used.   It was impossible to place a sofa without feeling like it was free-floating in the middle of the room.  The choice to make that space the dining room (not the original layout for the house) and the decision to get rid of the gas fireplace were critical, tough decisions.   Now the dining table fits in the center of the room naturally, and we opened up a wall for the console/mirror that now anchors the room visually.

Furniture:

• Console Table – This table was a great find.  It fit perfectly and had an ‘apothecary’ feel.
  
• Dining Room Table and old chairs are nondescript as intended.  We want the eye to go to the walls, where all the ‘stuff’ is.
• Windam Corner Cabinet - discontinued from Crate and Barrel, but a good solution for a corner.

Steampunk is undeniably trendy.  It wasn’t that hard to find suitable furniture from the major manufacturers.  I knew I wanted some kind of console for displaying items, and a mirror above it.  The one we picked has a lot of drawers and isn’t too deep.   The dining room table extends larger if we need it.   On the near wall, not pictured, we hope to put some kind of settee, but none has yet been purchased – though not for lack of trying.  Twice we bought one of these, but it came damaged both times and we gave up.

We considered more stylized furniture from people like Vincent Lehman, but in the end we wanted lighting and decor to drive the visual effect.  So we stayed with simpler furniture.

Lighting:

• Overhead Chandelier was the item that began our quest.  I saw it on Steampunk Home at the same time my wife saw it in the catalog. We each showed it to the other and a project was born.
• Mad Scientist lights get so much attention although getting the right bulbs has been a challenge.
• Wall Sconces from Steve Erenberg (radio guy).  These are unique, but he has others.  They are so critical to the look.
• Clamp-light (no link – sold out) from Steve Erenberg with flicker bulb.

Lighting is the main feature.  Everything is done with dim, antique ‘Edison’ bulbs for a glowing, pre-industrial look.  I have all but the overhead chandelier on a timer so it pops on for the morning and evening, but is off in daytime and late night.  The effect of the lighting is fantastic.  Of course in 2012 when, like Europe, the US bans the sale of incandescent light bulbs, we will be in trouble.  Here’s hoping a compromise is struck before that date, or else the Creekmores will be stockpiling bulbs. I’m not kidding.

Wallpaper

The decision to go with wallpaper was risky and expensive.  It could have gone very badly.  And who would have sympathized with us for making a mistake with wallpaper?  No one uses wallpaper in homes anymore.  When is the last time you noticed wallpaper and said ‘Brilliant!’.

Wallpaper was an essential element of Victorian decorating and I thought the risk might be worth taking as long as the wallpaper was extraordinary.  So I searched for custom wallpaper.  There are, I discovered, very few artisan wallpaper manufacturers.

But there is one, and it was all I needed.  Bradbury and Bradbury out of San Francisco have been supplying period-authentic Victorian wallpaper designs to Bay Areas Victorians for decades.

Trish and I looked at lots of samples, talked with them a little and settled on a suite of prints originally designed by Christian Herter, a New York designer for turn-of-the-century moguls.   The Herter Brothers tradition design appealed to us and we picked the jasper green set (left).  Wallpaper installation is hard and the materials were pricey, so we trusted only our favorite painter and contractor: Ivan Tokic (301-495-7839) and his crew.   (You can see him at work above.)  The total for materials and installation were about $4,000, so this was the most expensive single element of our plan.

Decorations:

• Wall mirror from Horchow.  This took ages to pick out, and it works brilliantly with the sconces.
• Thermometer: Just a cheap Galileo Thermometer from Amazon.com
• Clock from Roger Wood:  He shipped this quickly for a Party we were having.  It’s awesome.
  

  

• Antique Moroccan Astrolab: This was purchased in Marrakesh on our last trip – 2009.  Pictured on the right.
• Birdcage from ebay that took a little repair.  We hope to add a miniature human skeleton inside.
• Terrarium (about $65) on a plant stand we bought years ago.
• The rug is from Peshawar, Pakistan purchased on a trip in 2006
• Push-button light-switch wallplate – It’s the little things that make the look.
• Nautical weather station – The nautical theme, from jules Verne, runs deep.  Being avid scuba divers, we love it.
• Mounted Megolodon Tooth – A gift to my wife when she worked at the Discovery Channel.  It’s huge, probably 6 inches high.  We spent a lot to mount it professionally and it’s gorgeous.
• Brass Goggles – from SXSW craft booth.
• Mounted Fossils – Well, these are still unmounted, but we got three fossils in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco and will display them.
• Diving Helmet - We have not purchased this yet but it’s an essential element.  It’ll go on top of the corner cabinet. Antiques are usually over $1000 and replicas are usually shiny brass, which is a no-no.

Decorations are the fun part, because you can’t go wrong.  Mixing nautical, scientific, pre-industrial, and mechanical themes is a blast, whether you are bargain-hunting or impulse-buying.  The Victorian aesthetic mixes items from the orient; accessable finally to the emerging 19th centyr middle class. We have hand-delivered items from Pakistan, Morocco, and Egypt. But several bits were purchased easily from Amazon and Ebay.

We still have lots of wall space to cover so the fun isn’t going to end soon.

Stuff to come:

It’s still not done, although we have shifted our attention to other projects and areas of the house.  But we won’t consider it complete until we place the last pieces of the puzzle.

• Curtains: No Victorian home was considered finished without curtains. We will eventually have them, but they aren’t cheap.  We have purple velour curtains picked out from Smith and Noble, but I’m afraid of measuring incorrectly and installation seems like a pain.
• Settee: We still have a wall that needs a settee/love seat.  I’m searching ebay, but it’s very hard to find one that we like.  Leather, with brass would be best.
• Bookshelves: The library look is essential.  I have great Eastlake cast-iron shelve brackets picked out, but I need to find aged or reclaimed wood.

Email us with your thoughts or questions. If you read this far, you must be my mom. Hi mom!

No related posts.

I’ve had it for about 6 months and it’s been used for hundreds of hours.  Like everything I ‘review’, I actually use it a lot.  Why is is great?  It simply does what a video player should:  provide a beautiful video image and run with a very long battery life.

Archos 7 with an iPhone

More importantly, both phones and laptops run out of batteries very quickly.  I can watch 6 or 7 hours of video on the Archos 7 and twice that with the duplicate battery.   And it stores, potentially, over a hundred normal length movies and still have space left for your music collection.  Content can come from a DVR ‘docking’ station where you record whatever is showing on your TV.   I think you can do rentals from Amazon, although I’m not sure.   We have a big DVD collection so that’s what we use.

The internet wi-fi features were rarely useful to me, but it can double as a portable web browser with built-in support for hotmail, gmail and yahoo email.  It will store documents and pictures.  I did use it as a backup for photos on our Middle East month-long trip.

It’s heavy at 1.5 lbs so you won’t be carrying it in a pocket.  And it’s not cheap at around $400.  I wish it would play videos over 2GB, but it’s not a serious problem because it’s easy to get a 2 hour high-quality movie under that size.  It did take several tries and some research to figure out how to get movies into the right format on the device.  It’s not as easy as buying a video from itunes and having it automatically download.

The Archos 7 is an opinion-polarizing device for consumers.  Half the Amazon reviews are 5-star and half are 1-star.  It apparently doesn’t do nearly the number of things the manufacturer says it should do.  So do your research first if you need something specific.  I use it as a video player only, and for that it’s fantastic.  But frustrated users, promised more than they were delivered, abound.

The only add-ons I recommend are a leather case, a spare battery, and a y-splitter so both kids can watch/listen.

Related posts:

1. Travel Gear Review: Shure E5C Headphones
2. Family Travel Moment: Fern Canyon, Humboldt County, Calif.
3. Family Travel Moment: Club Med, Ixtapa, Mexico

Goodbye Luxor!

We pack up and leave Luxor on Tuesday. The airport is brand new, empty, cool and has free wireless. Our flight to Cairo is short and we can see the great pyramids at Giza, the step pyramid of Zoser and the other ‘great’ pyramids in Dashur from the plane as we approach Cairo. Stepping off the plane, we are immediately relieved that it’s about 25 degrees cooler than Luxor. We check into the Cairo Hyatt and get a small but nice room with a fantastic Nile view on the 29th floor. Our welcome refreshments in the business lounge are sipped with the great pyramids visible in the distance.

View of the Nile from our balcony in Cairo

We are halfway through our trip and badly need to do laundry. Fortunately, the Internews office here helps me find a local by-the-kilo laundromat and I head to Garden City with two small garbage bags full of dirty clothes. Overall, we’ve packed very well — the bags aren’t over-stuffed and we can comfortably move through airports and stations. Good luggage helps a lot. For Christmas, Trish and I bought ‘each other’ new Briggs and Reily stuff and it has held up well. With the new airline fees, one has to pack in smaller bags, so we got four medium bags that are small enough for the kids to roll if they have to (and sometimes they do).

Trisha and I each have a spacious roller laptop carry-ons that we love for the long plane rides. I’d recommend those to anyone who travels. They reduce back strain a lot in airports and we can carry a lot of gear in them. Another winner is Trish’s great over-the-shoulder day bag by Eagle Creek. It looks good and exposes her back to the breeze, which is great when it’s hot.

Sunset on the Nile, Cairo

When I get back to the hotel, we hit the smallish pool and then have an expensive, but great meal of Indian food. Egyptian cuisine can be good, but we’ve had a lot of it and the change is delicious. Out on the Nile, party boats of all sizes shimmer with electric lights. The city doesn’t skip a beat as it gets dark. Cairo rivals New York as a late-night city, but after a few work calls it’s bedtime for us.

On Wednesday morning we go to the Egyptian Museum. We grab a cab outside the hotel and drive the short distance to the museum, housed in a ghastly pink-orange, turn-of-the-last-century building. Tour busses line the outer gate entrance and we have to push a bit to get in. It’s the first tourist place that has been crowded. The three security checks in a hundred yards don’t make things go any faster.

My plan was to spend a few hours now and return another day for the rest because the collection is so extensive. Instead, we were in and out in 90 minutes with no need to return. It’s not that there aren’t great things there — the museum is the preeminent Egypt collection in the world. But it’s a freaking disaster! Inside, the heat is immediately noticeable. There is no air conditioning. You start to look around and it looks cluttered. Less than a quarter of the stuff is labeled in any language, and maybe half have nothing but handwritten numbers. It’s semi-organized but it’s very hard to tell where one area starts and another one stops.

And most of all, there is simply too much stuff. It’s impossible to mentally absorb any information when staring at 40 or 50 wooden sarcophagi grouped together. It looks like the attic of an eccentric old man. But the real attic is worse. Three years ago, they found the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s most famous Pharaohs, in the museum’s third floor attic, where it had languished, unidentified, for over 100 years. It certainly makes you appreciate the hard work museums do to curate and make the items accessible to the public.

Outside the Egyptian Museum, Cairo

And yet, the place is charming. It feels like Egypt — dusty, cluttered, functional and unselfconscious. I am more stuck by the state of the museum itself than anything I saw. And we saw some good things. The Tutankhamen stuff is amazing. Trish was surprised and pleased to see the funeral mask/headdress on display. We saw some great jewelry, and of course the mummies.

Trish went to see the human mummies. Since I had seen them the year before, I stayed with the kids, who were too scared. Nearby was the animal mummy section but neither kid wanted to go at first. Lily got up the courage and enjoyed it a lot. She and I then dragged Emma in physically resisting until she saw the 12-foot mummified crocodile. That piqued her interest. Egypt is building a new museum near the great pyramids for about 2012 (maybe). If you can get to Cairo before then, this museum-pocolypse is unforgettable.

Lunch on the Nile with Cairo staffers. Kids cannot stay awake.

We had lunch on the Nile with my colleagues from the Cairo office, a friendly bunch. Then some pool, work, dinner, more work and sleep. It’s the second day of an easy schedule and we all appreciate the slower pace. Tomorrow we pick it up again and hit the only remaining wonder of the world.

[Photos by Trisha Creekmore]

Related posts:

1. Khan e Khalili Market, Cairo, Egypt: Day 20
2. Dr. Ragab’s Moronic Village and Carnival of Death, Cairo, Egypt: Day 21
3. Luxor, Egypt: Day 12