Second look at Microsoft 365 Copilot

A few weeks ago, I posted a “first look” blog about my early experiences testing Microsoft 365 Copilot. I approached Copilot from the perspective of an average and untrained user who just wanted to get his questions answered. I purposefully didn’t read any of the documentation or try any specific prompt engineering… just as an average user would, I jumped in and started doing stuff, then I wrote up the results.

That first-look generated a lot of attention after it was posted on Hacker News, which was briefly fun, and led to a running series of conversations and tests with my old friend Scott Schnoll from Microsoft. Based on my discussions with Scott, and what I learned from them, I wanted to recap the tests and see if any of the results had changed.

Before I do that, let’s talk a little about the Copilot “system” itself. I put “system” in quotes to emphasize that Copilot is really a system of systems built on top of, and into, various existing parts of the Microsoft 365 substrate. What most people think of as the AI piece of Copilot (the LLM) is only one part of the overall system. Microsoft has integrated the LLM with tenant data, web search, and (some of) the Microsoft 365 Apps suite. The Copilot experience you see is delivered by this combination, not just by the LLM alone. The LLM is based on the GPT family of engines from OpenAI; GPT can perform a wide range of content-creation tasks (which is why it’s called a “generative” AI tool), including generating original content that looks like it was written or drawn by a human. Copilot uses private instances of this LLM in Microsoft datacenters that mimic natural language based on patterns from large amounts of training data.

Completely apart from the work done to train the underlying global and tenant models, Microsoft has added its own proprietary code. Copilot iteratively processes output from multiple components and orchestrates them: your user prompt is combined with grounding data, history from your chat or prompt sessions, and a default system prompt customized for Microsoft 365. This default prompt helps outline rules for interacting responsibly with the user, but also helps the GPT models know context.

My point in saying this is to highlight that there are a lot of moving parts in the keyboard-to-output pipeline, many of which may not be obvious and some of which are not broadly documented.

Before we dig into the testing: two notes.

Note 1 is that to get good results, you have to enable web search. The Copilot for Microsoft 365 chat experience in Bing, Edge, and the Copilot app in Teams can incorporate web searches and, if you don’t enable this, you may not see results for some queries. This enablement is done in two places: at the tenant level (where it’s on by default) and at the plugin. If the tenant setting is off, the end-user toggle will be disabled. I didn’t realize that plugin-level enablement was required at first, and having it off negatively affected my first set of results.

Scott pointed out that Microsoft strongly believes that allowing Copilot to reference web content improves the user experience (it certainly did for me!) and increases productivity with Copilot, which is why the feature is automatically enabled at the tenant level. In fact, allowing Copilot to reference web content decreases its chances of hallucinating by giving it an additional source of grounding data.

Keep in mind that, when web search is enabled, customer content will be sent to Bing, outside the tenant boundary, which is why there is also a user-level toggle. It’s also why some customers might choose to disable it altogether, which a Global admin can do from the Search & intelligence page in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

To enable this:

1. Open the Copilot web app
2. Click the plugin icon, on the right of the chat bar (it’s marked with a red square in the screenshot below)
3. Make sure that the “Web content” toggle is turned on.

Note 2 is that you can give Copilot feedback on the quality of the results. I didn’t do this in my first tests because I assumed the feedback went to /dev/null. As it turns out, Scott tells me that the feedback from Copilot users is reviewed by humans, and that Microsoft takes this feedback very seriously, with regular reviews and action based on user feedback. I can say that I saw several improvements in result quality during the period of this testing.

For that reason, the more detail you include in the feedback, the more useful it is– so a thumbs-down isn’t as useful as a thumbs-down with a short explanation.

Throughout these tests, the benchmark I’ve used is that to give a thumbs-up if the result is correct, complete, and useful. If it’s incorrect and/or incomplete and/or not useful, it gets a thumbs-down. In addition, if there’s something about it that I think needs further explanation or is not quite awesome, it gets a thumbs-down. The feedback isn’t directly applied to the Copilot, so the humans who read must decide what changes to make. Detailed feedback helps them do that.

Test 1: Find and summarize something in a OneDrive document

I’ll use the same query I did before: “Can you summarize how the glideslope coupler on a Century III autopilot operates?” The result is spot on: correct and complete, including a citation to the source document, which is in my OneDrive. (To see the reference(s), click the little chevron next to the “1 reference” text, as shown in the image below). This one got a thumbs-up.

Test 2: answer some fact-based questions from a document

In my previous test, I asked some questions about my airplane that I thought should be easy to answer. The first one was “what’s the single-engine service ceiling of a Baron 55?” Now, there’s a trick to answering this, which I didn’t fully realize when I asked it. The actual SE service ceiling for a specific Baron 55 will vary according to the aircraft weight, the temperature and density of the surrounding air, and the altitude you’re currently flying at. There’s a chart in the pilot operating handbook (POH) that you use to calculate this. I didn’t take that into account when asking (and, in case you’re wondering, Copilot isn’t currently able to read and interpolate graphs, sorry!)

When I did this test with Scott, the results were pretty good. When I repeated the test for this post, I got a different result. Here’s what I got from “what’s the single-engine service ceiling of a Baron 55?“

This got a thumbs-down because of the reference to the Colemill-conversion aircraft. That conversion puts a (delightfully) more powerful engine on the Baron airframe, which raises climb performance and the single-engine service ceiling. The wording of the result implies that the ceiling only varies with weight on non-Colemill Barons, which isn’t right.

My test with Scott only included the second citation, and correctly answered the question for the specific airplane mentioned in that cited article. The last sentence of the result is not wrong but it’s also not precisely correct– I’d say it’s “usefully wrong” but the answer still got a thumbs-down.

I tried again with a more refined query: “what’s the single-engine service ceiling of a 1968 Baron B55?” This gave me basically the second half of the previous answer: 7000′ at 5100lbs. Unfortunately, the article cited quotes numbers for a 1973 Baron 55. Now, here’s the thing: the 1973 and 1968 models have the same engines and wing area, and the same weight, so the answer is correct but the framing could use some improvement. I gave this one a thumbs-up (remember: complete, correct, useful) but that was a little bit of a charity call.

In my testing, I discovered something that probably has an impact. Some of the PDF files I uploaded are scanned images and some are text. By that, I mean that (e.g.) the Baron POH I uploaded is basically several hundred pages of images. You can’t select or search for text in that file using the Edge PDF viewer. Asking simple questions like “what’s the wing area of a Baron 55?” didn’t produce a result even though I could see the correct answer in the document– but neither did searching for “wing area” in the PDF. I suspect there’s still some more work to be done here.

I also belatedly figured out that the POH doesn’t make any reference to model years– just serial numbers! The POH covers serial numbers TC-957 through TC-1607, which roughly corresponds to the 1964-1975 production years.

Both these examples were significantly better than in my first round of testing.

I continued on by asking “what V_le is for a 1968 Beech Baron 55“. I did this even though I knew that the POH wasn’t indexed by model year because I wanted to try fairly replicating the previous tests. Copilot got the correct answer (yay! thumbs up!) but it didn’t cite my own checklist as a source, which puzzled me a little bit. Here’s the first result it produced:

Scott taught me that you can include specific files as a source or reference with the “/” key (a feature called Context IQ, or CIQ), so I decided to ask again using my specific checklist. The answer was correct and complete: “According to the N421BJ checklist, the Vle (maximum landing gear extended speed) for this aircraft is 143 knots.” I’m not sure why, but in this case, my own document wasn’t prioritized over a similar document from the web.

Another question from round 1: “what is the minimum controllable airspeed for a Baron 55?” This speed (abbreviated V_mca) is incredibly important because if you go slower, you’re at risk of a fatal crash. That search produced no results. Changing it to “what is vmca for a Baron 55?” also produced no results. Issuing either of these queries to vanilla Bing.com resulted in finding the “Baron 55-A55 Checklist” file referenced in the previous question as the first result–so something was amiss here. When I repeated the test later, I got correct results.

Test 3: Document summarization

Summarization is one of my big interests; I want an assistant that can absorb and abstract complex content, as long as the abstract is complete, correct, and useful. (I have another post in work covering using Copilot for Word for document summarization, too). In the previous tests, I asked for a summary of a document from my OneDrive.

Careful readers will notice that this summary is slightly different from the one in round 1 of the tests. This is an important point to note: if you ask Copilot the same question 10 times, you won’t get exactly the same answer each time. Transformer-based machine learning systems are not deterministic, so this variance of answers is normal and expected, but it may also be a little offputting if you’re not expecting it. Interestingly, this response also includes some sugar: “Is there anything else you would like to know?” is just frosting to make Copilot seem more polite and human; I didn’t think it added any actual value but, as it turns out, treating LLMs more humanely improves their output.

I then asked a more generic question: “can you summarize the major problems with reusable passwords?” The Copilot response here was excellent: it included some “company” documents plus a web search. Because I have multiple “company” documents that are relevant, I think it could be argued that the company summary could be richer or more detailed, but this is a quite good response overall. Thumbs up.

Test 4: Drafting email with Copilot for Outlook

I wasn’t going to repeat this test from the original (using the prompt “Draft an email to Adam Henry. Thank him for joining us at our customer dinner. Ask him if it would be possible to have a technical meeting with him during the week of 20 December to discuss our turbo encabulator.“) because I didn’t expect the results to be meaningfully different. Just to be sure, I did repeat it and, sure enough, the result was as before: correct and complete, but also bland and blah. No score. That said, I’ve shared my feedback with Microsoft, and they shared with me (under NDA) some of their plans to improve this experience. Once their work is complete and my NDA is lifted, I’ll have more to say about this experience.

Test 5: Coaching with Copilot for Outlook

Based on my conversations with Scott, I decided to wait to redo these tests until I do a deeper dive into Copilot for Outlook. I wanted to make sure I had found some realistic use cases for coaching; as someone who drafts dozens of emails per day, I have a pretty high bar for what would be useful in a feature like this.

Who’s training who?

It’s fair to say that Copilot performed much better in this second round of tests than it did in the first round. Some of that is because Microsoft fixed issues with various parts of the Copilot system; some of it is because I have a more refined understanding of what I should be expecting (e.g. Copilot won’t interpolate graph data for me!)

As with getting a new pet, the training process is actually bidirectional, and you should expect your users’ behavior to change as they learn more about how to get the desired results from Copilot. I have a lot more I want to say about this bidirectional training, because it’s one of the most interesting areas around adoption of generative AI in the workplace. Stay tuned for more… but next, Outlook!

2023 year in review: books

If you believe Goodreads, I read 164 books this year.

Now, in fairness, there’s some fuzz here. A few of those were very short; a few were re-reads of books I’d previously read. I probably missed a few physical books that I forgot to log. There are definitely a few that I previously finished on Kindle, but where the Kindle app didn’t update the “finished on” date properly. I’ll apply a generous 10% discount and call it 150 books for the year.

In past years I might’ve listed them all and included links to them on Amazon. Sorry, not doing that this year; it’s too much work. But I also didn’t want to abandon my tradition of doing an end-of-the-year book list, so this post is a low-effort compromise.

My top books:

• “Do Hard Things” by running coach Steve Magness. Terrific meditation on what it means to be “tough,” and how to develop real resilience and grit.
• “A Hostage to Fortune,” Ernest Gann’s memoir. I love Gann’s writing style, and looking back on his career as a pilot, author, and general hell-raiser was really eye-opening.
• “Alone at Dawn,” the story of how John Chapman won the Medal of Honor as a USAF pararescueman. A stirring story that drives home just how little most of us know about what the women and men who serve in our military may be asked to do and endure in our names.
• “Everybody Knows” by Jordan Harper. After last year’s “The Last King of California” (also terrific, also a book I read this year) and 2021’s “She Rides Shotgun,” I was expecting this noir story of corruption in Hollywood to pack a punch, but wow!
• “Magic City Blues,” another noir, but this one set in exotic… Birmingham, Alabama.
• “American Sirens,” the almost completely unknown story of the first ambulance service in the US… built and staffed by African-Americans in Pittsburgh.
• “All the Sinners Bleed,” by S.A. Cosby. Cosby is an automatic must-read for me. Read this and you’ll see why.
• “Red Team Blues,” a science-fiction-ish novel about a retired guy who gets dragged back into… forensic accounting. I think I’d like Cory Doctorow, the author, if we sat down for a beer, but some of his books have had a preachy tone I don’t care for. This one, thankfully, didn’t. I’m eagerly awaiting “The Bezzle,” the planned-for-2024 sequel featuring the same protagonist.
• “Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves,” a recap of how a CIA case officer and a USAF desk jockey more or less dragged the US into developing an armed drone capability. Funny story that doesn’t obscure the fundamental change in tactics thus introduced.
• “Moscow X,” David McCloskey’s superb sequel to “Damascus Station,” one of my favorites from last year. No one does spy fiction any better than McCloskey.
• Jean-Louis Gassée’s memoir, “Grateful Geek.” If you were around Apple products in the 1980s onwards, you may recognize his name; even if you don’t his insight and perspective on the tech industry, plus his skill as a raconteur, makes this well worth reading.

I’m not going to do a list of my bottom books; that would be rude. I will mention finishing, and being disappointed in, a few that I’d hoped would be better: Eli Cranor’s “Don’t Know Tough” (but his second book, “Ozark Dogs,” was terrific!), Mick Ryan’s “White Sun War,” Martin Cruz Smith’s “Independence Square,” and Claire North’s “The Fifteen Lives of Harry August” (probably the book I most regret having spent time on this year)

This year I also chose not to finish a whole bunch of books, including “This is How You Lose the Time War,” “Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks,” “The Killing Moon,” and “The Facemaker” (about the invention of reconstructive plastic surgery in World War I… just too gross.)

Onwards!

2023 year in review: flying

Let’s start with the high level: 128.7 hours flown, 12.9 of which were training hours flown with an instructor. 15 hours were in actual instrument conditions, and 10 hours were at night. Not bad, but could have been more. The map view is instructive too: I made it as far north as Montpelier, Vermont and as far west as Dallas, Texas.

Despite the modest number of hours, there were lots of things to highlight, both positive and negative.

My best trip of the year was, hands down, flying the girls to NYC, Niagara, and Vermont, including doing the Hudson River exclusion. It was an amazing trip, and one which wouldn’t have been at all possible without a personal airplane. Bonus points for flying into Teterboro and just missing Taylor Swift’s arrival.

In the same vein, the rapid-fire combination of going to New Orleans, rural Arkansas, and Alexandria, with returns home in between, made it possible to do a family photo shoot in New Orleans City Park, attend my cousin’s wedding, and go to my mom’s for Thanksgiving while still accomplishing all the other Thanksgiving-week things we had to do (including Erica’s departure for Romania. This was another set of trips that wouldn’t have been possible without a plane.

I made a renewed effort to get my commercial multi-engine rating, training for my commercial multi-engine rating with Brian Frederickson of Elon Aviation. I’m happy to count Brian among my friends– he’s a great guy and I learned an amazing amount from him. We hit a few obstacles along the way (more on that in a bit).

Finally, I was able to squeeze in a few desired and/or needed upgrades throughout the year. The biggest, both in time and cost, was adding two Aspen displays installed to provide redundancy in instrument flight. The safety and situational awareness improvements are significant, but it wasn’t cheap or easy.

What about the less-positive parts of the year? There were a few. I did have to miss a few trips due to maintenance, something I always hate. The plane was down for a new alternator for a couple of weeks (an adventure in itself– thanks to Tim Blount of Tim’s Aircraft Service in New Orleans for getting me fixed up!) and I had to cancel one planned checkride flight with Brian because of a broken flap bumper. The Aspen installation took an extra few weeks over the original estimate, which meant I missed a planned trip to Orlando and a couple of last-minute pop-up opportunities. The overall installation process was a bit of a mess, since my autopilot was down after the installation, meaning a lot of hand-flying back and forth for my November trips. I think it turned out OK in the end. I’ll do a longer post on the process, and what I learned, once I know for sure that everything is properly installed, but here’s a preview.

For those of you who aren’t avionics technicians, just know that the red wire shouldn’t be loose, there shouldn’t be any pink fuzz or silver shielding visible, and the whole thing looks like it was wired by a drunk one-eyed monkey wearing oven mitts. To be super clear, my shop didn’t do this; they fixed it when they found it in this condition.

The biggest aviation lowlight of the year was when I failed my oral exam for the commercial multi. I’ll be doing a longer post on the process of getting my multi once I take the actual checkride, but it’s fair to say that I didn’t adequately prepare for the oral exam and the examiner figured that out pretty quickly.

What did I learn this year? Well, let’s start with that oral exam. I learned I didn’t retain as much of the basic private-pilot-level knowledge about VFR charts and flight rules as I thought. In my partial defense, I don’t typically use that information when I’m blasting through the clouds on a cross-country flight, but that’s not an excuse. My first learning is therefore “I need to keep learning.” It’s trite, but it’s true.

Second learning: I know a lot more about the systems in my airplane as a result of doing some work on it myself and researching the maintenance issues I had this year. This knowledge is useful in troubleshooting, but also in getting the most out of the plane when I want to plan a trip.

Third learning: practicing emergency procedures is a must, as when I had my first real one-engine-inoperative (OEI) landing. The time I spent reviewing and practicing with Brian paid off big time. Knowing that I can be proficient with OEI flight, approaches, and landings is super important. I’ll be doing more of that kind of training in 2024.

Goals for 2024? Simple. Get my commercial multi; average at least one day trip down to Louisiana to see my mom each month; have a 95% dispatch rate for planned trips; continue to learn about and enjoy my Baron. Stretch goals are to attend some combination of Sun-n-Fun, the Beech Bash, and Oshkosh.

Flying Friday: my first precautionary engine shutdown

A couple of weeks ago, I had my first real in-flight engine shutdown, with a bonus declared emergency as a cherry on top. I wanted to write up what happened and what I learned from it. I have about 1300 hours of total flight time, about 200 of which is in this airplane, so I am experienced enough to know that I can always learn and do better. I posted the below account on BeechTalk, and am also sharing it here, in the spirit of learning from the experience, both for me and possibly for others.

The planned flight was from Huntsville (KHSV) to Newnan County (KCCO, about a 40-minute drive south of Atlanta-Hartsfield). That’s about 50 minutes of flying time. I wanted to drop the plane off at Oasis Aviation for an autopilot repair. Weather was excellent– clear, sunny, and light winds– but I filed an IFR flight plan anyway, mostly so I’d have ATC support in case I needed it. My friend and former airplane partner was going to pick me up there and fly me back home.

I took from KHSV normally, with the usual weird Huntsville-to-Atlanta routing (a radial off GAD, followed by another radial off RMG, thence direct), and climbed to my planned altitude of 5000′. I eventually got cleared direct KCCO, and everything was awesome until it wasn’t.

About 20min into the flight, I noticed a slight but persistent shaking from the left engine. I didn’t like it because it was new. Checking the engine monitor showed me that the cylinder head temperatures (CHT) on cylinders 4 and 6 was significantly lower than normal, which I also didn’t like. The CHT reflects how hot the engine is running; when the fuel/air mixture is properly set, my CHTs run anywhere from 280ºF to 340ºF, depending on the outside temperature.

I tried adjusting the fuel mixture, which didn’t make the vibration any better or worse, and I tried switching magnetos, which also did nothing. Each engine has a pair of magnetos, and each cylinder has two spark plugs, so switching magnetos to see if the temperature of any cylinder or exhaust changes can be a useful diagnostic tool for things like broken spark plugs, bad wiring connections on the plug wires, and so on.

I flew along for a few more minutes and then the exhaust gas temperature (EGT) on cylinder 6 started dropping significantly too, to the point where the engine monitor was squawking about the difference in EGT between the highest and lowest temperature. That told me that something more serious might be wrong.

At that point, my mind was made up: grab the checklist, flip to the “abnormal procedures” page, and run the “engine shutdown in flight” checklist. That much was a total non-event. The checklist itself is simple: you cut off the supply of fuel to the engine by retarding the mixture control, shut off the engine fuel valve, feather the propeller (so that it turns sideways, thus reducing drag), and turn off the magnetos.

With the left engine shut down, I slowed up to about 135kts and lost a couple of hundred feet, which I was able to gain back. I called Atlanta Center and told them I’d lost an engine. For some reason, they were having great difficulty hearing me and they got another plane to relay communications back and forth until I had time to switch radios, after which they heard me OK. They gave me a block altitude of 4000-5000′, which was handy.

Learning point #1: Because I was headed adjacent to the ATL class B, and didn’t do it on my own, ATC declared an emergency for me. I could have done so myself, but, as God is my witness, I didn’t feel like it was an actual emergency at that point– it was just an inconvenience. The other engine was running fine; the weather was good; there were other airports within easy distance. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what happens when you declare an emergency to ATC, but, in brief, it gives the controller latitude to move other airplanes out of your way and give you whatever services you need to ensure the best possible outcome. I didn’t think I needed any of that, so I didn’t ask for it.

Many pilots, not including me, are worried that if they declare, the FAA will get all in their grills. More on that later.

In retrospect, what I should have done is declared earlier. (Cue the scene where Maverick’s getting chewed out in Top Gun: “WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE IS LAND THAT PLANE.”)

At first I planned to continue on to Newnan. I knew they have maintenance on the field, and it was only about another 20 minutes. I flew on for another 5 minutes or so, then the thought dawned on me: how stupid would I look explaining my decision to the NTSB after an incident? I noticed that West Georgia Regional Airport (KCTJ) was pretty much directly in front of me. So learning point #2: my first reaction should have been to head for the nearest airport instead of even considering continuing the flight. Yes, it was only another 20 minutes, but still.

As I was heading towards KCTJ, I decided to try restarting the engine. It started easily but was showing the same symptoms, so I shut it right back down again. This is learning point #3: I had no reason other than blind optimism to think that whatever was wrong had magically fixed itself. I wouldn’t have tried a restart if there had been any indications of problems with fuel or lubrication. In retrospect, I should’ve just left it shut down since the rule I was taught was always not to restart an engine unless you know, and have corrected, what was wrong with it.

Throughout, ATC was super helpful. I didn’t need vectors to the airport because I could see it clearly, and I was already aligned with the one runway there. In fact, because I was darn near on top of the approach end of 17 at KCTJ, I had to fly a teardrop pattern to slow down and lose some altitude. I made a rather good one-engine landing (which is a little more challenging than it sounds) and taxied to the ramp.

After landing, I secured the plane, went inside, and opened an AOG (“aircraft on ground”) ticket with Savvy.

See how the propeller is turned sideways? That means it’s feathered. Much sadness.

Here’s what the engine data looked like. The EGTs are shown in the top graph, and the CHTs on the bottom. The big dip in the EGT cyan line just after 35min marks the shutdown; before that you can see the discrepancy in CHT (the purple and cyan lines on the bottom graph) and EGT.

Savvy quarterbacked having the on-field shop take a look at the engine. There were several possible causes for the symptoms I saw, but the most likely was something that blocked the flow of fuel to the cylinders. If you don’t put enough fuel in, the cylinder won’t generate as much power, or get as hot, as its peers. This leads to vibration and suspicious temperature readings. Other possible causes included a stuck exhaust valve (where exhaust leaks out when it’s not supposed to, reducing the cylinder’s ability to make power) or damage to the camshaft or pushrods that operate the valves. The shop cleaned the fuel injectors and did a visual inspection using a borescope to verify that the cylinders and valves were OK. I flew the plane on to Newnan and it worked flawlessly.

Then last week, I got a call from an aviation safety inspector at the FAA. Remember, I mentioned that FAA action is a common worry that leads pilots of small planes not to declare an emergency when they need to. The ASI was courteous and asked me for a short statement of what happened and a log entry from the shop that implemented the fix. I sent it to him and that was that.

First look at Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft has made tons of noise about their Microsoft 365 Copilot toolset. They’ve made a lot of promises about its capabilities to enhance individual and team productivity, but access to it has been very limited so far. This week, the product team gave Microsoft 365 MVPs access to a test environment with Copilot in it. This sandbox doesn’t have any data, so we had to bring our own. The product team said we could test the tools however we liked; this is the experience I’ve had so far.

To set up my sandbox, I uploaded some “work”-related documents. One large folder is manuals and documents from my future second career as a commercial pilot; the second is an archive of Practical 365 articles I wrote. I wanted to see how well summarization and Q&A worked. The Copilot family includes different assistant modalities for different applications– for example, Copilot for Outlook can do some things unique to Outlook, as can Copilot for PowerPoint, and so on. I didn’t test each of the individual modalities yet.

In my early tests so far, the results are… mixed. Some of these issues are probably due to user error and/or misunderstanding of what results I can reasonably expect. Some of them, I fear, are not.

Test 1: Find and summarize something in a OneDrive document

One of the documents I uploaded is the operating handbook for the Century III autopilot in my plane. I asked “Can you summarize how the glideslope coupler on a Century III autopilot operates?” The answer I got was “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any information about the glideslope coupler on a Century III autopilot in my internal knowledge or in your OneDrive.” There are 4 pages in one of the documents in my OneDrive that detail the operation, but it’s possible that Copilot hasn’t indexed things properly yet. I’ll try some other tests after a decent interval has passed.

Test 2: answer some fact-based questions from a document

Here’s what should be a simple fact based question: “what’s the single-engine service ceiling of a Baron 55?”

As you can see, the first answer is precise… but it is completely incorrect. I supplied a URL that has a better answer, which Copilot read and summarized. Then I asked the question again, with different and more precise wording. Different models, and model years, of Baron have different engines, which will affect their single-engine service ceilings.

This answer is also completely incorrect, but at least it’s different from the previous incorrect answer. anyone who plans a flight with a single-engine service ceiling of 15000′ or more in this aircraft will be in for a very rude surprise if they fly into mountainous terrain. Copilot did correctly explain what the single-engine service ceiling actually is, which is nice.

Here’s another example:

The original answer of “154 knots” is wrong, so I tried being helpful again by pointing Copilot directly to a better source. The specific page I referenced contains a table that lists the correct Vle speed. I realized after taking the screenshot that the table is a little confusing, because it lists two speeds for two different serial number ranges. But neither of those speeds is “154”.

Then I tried a different question, still related to the same document: I asked what the minimum controllable airspeed was for a Baron 55. Copilot’s answer was again not awesome:

According to the Pilot’s Operating Handbook for the Baron 95-B55 and 95-B55A, the minimum controllable airspeed for a Baron 55 is not explicitly stated. [PR: false; it’s shown in the table on 2-3] However, the handbook does provide information on the stall speed, [PR: also false; these speeds are not shown in the POH] which is the minimum speed at which the aircraft can maintain controlled flight. The stall speed for a Baron 55 with flaps up is 73 knots and with flaps down is 64 knots. [PR: this is correct but there is no citation shown]

As I said earlier, I thought it was possible that Copilot needed more time to read documents. I repeated some of these tests a day later and, surprisingly, the quality of the answers got worse. I thought maybe giving the exact serial number of the aircraft might help produce a more precise answer… but instead, Copilot forgot the answer it was able to find the previous day. Repeating the previous query repeated the same results.

In this case, Copilot subtracted value compared to a simple Internet search. Google Search produced the correct answer as its second result (after an ad). Bing Search didn’t show the correct answer on the first page of results and then I got tired of looking… I suspect this performance is a clue to Copilot’s inability to discover the correct answer.

Test 3: Document summarization

I alluded to this in test #1, but I’m prepared to say that the autopilot handbook hadn’t been indexed yet. I gave Copilot an easy one this time, and it did quite well:

Accurate and complete summary, plus a reference… very nice!

I tried again with a different question, to test whether Copilot would prefer my own work documents over general Internet searches. The first attempt produced a correct and useful summary, but my “company” data wasn’t included until I explicitly told it to:

I plan to run some more summarization tests after uploading some more documents (including the book chapters from Office 365 for IT Pros). So far, though, I am not seeing the improvement in results quality I had hoped for given that I am providing “work” data for the model to use. This may be 100% due to delays in ingesting the source material though.

Test 4: Drafting email with Copilot for Outlook

Copilot for Outlook can operate in two modes: you can ask Copilot to draft emails for you, and you can get coaching as you write. Drafting mode works reasonably well.

I first tried a very simple prompt: “Draft an email to Adam Henry. Thank him for joining us at our customer dinner. Ask him if it would be possible to have a technical meeting with him during the week of 20 December to discuss our turbo encabulator.“

The result was decent, if very bland. It’s essentially the same thing as the prompt I gave it, so I saved zero time by asking Copilot to do the work for me.

Dear Adam, I wanted to thank you for joining us at our customer dinner. We appreciate you taking the time to be with us. I hope you found the event informative and enjoyable. We would like to schedule a technical meeting with you during the week of December 20th to discuss our turbo encabulator. Would it be possible to arrange this at your convenience? Thank you and best regards, Paul.

I wanted to test whether Copilot for Outlook could create an email that summarized a document. Sadly, it can’t. My first test was asking it to summarize one of the Practical 365 columns from my OneDrive, but Copilot responded that it didn’t see the file. I then tried attaching the file to the draft email and asking for a summary.

This is really unfortunate, and I hope it’s something that Microsoft is working on.

In fairness, there are several things that Copilot for Outlook supports that I didn’t test. Because this sandbox environment doesn’t have any real data in it, I didn’t try to test summarizing of email threads. Copilot for Outlook is also supposed to be able to read a meeting summary generated by Intelligent meeting recap and then attach it to an email.

Test 5: Coaching with Copilot for Outlook

I selected “Coaching by Copilot” and started typing. After a few sentences, nothing happened. This is probably user error on my part. I then created a new draft, typed some text, and chose “Coaching by Copilot” again. This is the result I got.

Fair enough; I guess Copilot coaching isn’t meant to talk people out of sending emotionally-laden rants. I then fed it an edited version of an email I sent to a customer the other day, asking for a technical meeting. My source text of “Is there any way you might be able to squeeze me in to your calendar? If not, no worries—we will catch you in early January—but if possible I’d really like to get your technical input sooner rather than later.” generated this result:

My own personal opinion, supported by nothing, is that the original text wasn’t demanding or impatient, but then again this is why I don’t usually use writing assistants; I don’t usually agree with their suggestions on tone and voice. It’s interesting that Copilot didn’t attempt to help with the rudeness of the first email but was willing to suggest improvements in the second one.

A good first step…

LLM-based generative AIs have a lot of potential, as Gartner, AI vendors, and the press never tire of telling us. The Copilot tools in Microsoft 365 and Outlook are quite well integrated; they’re easy to find and easy to interact with. Thus far, I have to say that I am not super impressed with the output or utility of these tools though. I can see the potential for productivity improvements, and I’ll keep testing as the product evolves and improves.

Update 1…

After I posted this on Twitter, Microsoft’s Abram Jackson pointed out that I needed to enable per-user web search. There are two settings that control this: the first is at the tenant level, and it was on. However, individual users also have to opt in to including web results. I did that, with some excitement, and repeated the tests. Sadly, this change made some of my results worse. Microsoft’s Scott Schnoll also pointed out that you can provide result feedback with the thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons (see above screenshots), so I’ll be smashing those with a vengeance.

Flying Friday: fall break at Niagara Falls

Every year, my wife’s daughters have a school break the first or second week of October. Last year, we’d planned their first visit to Canada, but work intervened and instead we all went to Denmark. Sorry, not sorry. This year, we’d planned a makeup trip to visit Niagara Falls, plus a side trip to Vermont to see my sister and her family. It ended up being a terrific trip that vividly demonstrated the value and utility of GA airplane travel.

Our parameters were pretty simple: we had from Saturday morning until Thursday evening, bookended by football games, to do whatever we were going to do. The Baron has about 5 hours flying range (including IFR reserves) but, for everyone’s comfort, I prefer a maximum stage length of about 3.5 hours. That meant a fuel stop somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region. We went through several iterations of plans, based on the availability and cost of lodging in Niagara and Montpelier, before we arrived at our final plans. For example, originally we wanted to fly up and stop overnight at the Flying W Airport to take advantage of their unique pool… but it closes for the season on Labor Day, and there’s no hotel there anyway. Here’s how the trip went.

Day 1: Huntsville to Hagerstown to Jersey City

Our first leg was easy: Huntsville to Hagerstown, 526nm in 3:17. The weather was clear and ATC sent us direct. We landed and parked at Rider Jet Center so we could have lunch at their restaurant, The Grille at Runways. In fact, we picked Hagerstown specifically because of this restaurant, and it lived up to expectations. I also bought a can of Prist glass cleaner, and I’m glad I did: it worked far better than Plexus, which is hard to find nowadays anyway.

Erica had booked us a room in Jersey City at a Hyatt that’s right on the Hudson River waterfront. I had been debating whether to fly into Linden or Teterboro. This was a fun planning exercise. The diagram below helps to illustrate why. Teterboro is in the upper-right corner; Linden is at the bottom left. Our hotel was right near the green flag labeled “CLOCK”– so from a ground transport perspective, either would do. Teterboro is much busier, but Linden is often more difficult to use because of its position next to Newark’s airspace. What finally decided me in favor of TEB was that their fuel was significantly cheaper. I filed and briefed to Teterboro while the Rider crew topped off the tanks and we took off.

I had filed a direct routing because I know the secret: in complex airspace, it doesn’t matter what you ask for in your flight plan. The FAA’s computers will spit out a route based on a bunch of factors, including letters of agreement between adjoining ATC fiefdoms, expected traffic, terrain, and weather, and you may end up flying a different route anyway (more on that later!) The route they assigned was actually KHGR SCAPE ETX FJC STW KTEB–we actually approached Teterboro from just north of the Essex County airport shown above. We ended up flying that route. Teterboro typically uses different runways for arrival and departure, so they were having all arrivals fly the ILS Z approach to runway 6.

Every little blue arrow is an airplane. Note how many of them are around the area we’re going to.

Although the NYC airspace is super busy and the controllers talk fast, the en route, arrival, and approach were all straightforward. We parked at Meridian, where I’d made us a reservation, and grabbed a Lyft to the hotel. I snapped a quick photo showing the hundreds of millions of dollars of business jets parked just on one side of us– my whole airplane costs less than the landing gear on that plane directly behind me.

The hotel was perfectly nice; by far the best thing about it was its location. As promised, it was right on the riverfront, with easy walking access to restaurants and a few shops. We dropped our bags off and went out to go wander around and explore.

view from the sidewalk outside our hotel

nighttime view across the river

We walked down to the Colgate clock, took a bunch of selfies and photos with the city in the background, and then went to bed.

Day 2: Teterboro to Niagara International

Erica had booked tickets for the pedestal tour at the Statue of Liberty, but with the threat of a government shutdown looming we decided to cancel the advance tickets to make sure we didn’t lose out. As it turned out, there weren’t any pedestal tickets available, so we settled for the standard tour of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty island. Both were fantastic– I thoroughly enjoyed Ellis Island and learned a great deal from the museum exhibits. (Example fun fact: between 1896 and 1924, there was 3x as much immigration to the US from Canada as from Mexico.)

We had a late lunch at the White Horse Tavern, then headed back to Teterboro, where sadly the airplane wasn’t ready as promised. There were three or four uniformed security guards milling around, and our suspicion was that they were there because Taylor Swift was due in town for the Jets-Chiefs game. Unfortunately we left before she got there. I wasn’t too sad, though, because I had planned to fly the Hudson River corridor on the way out.

The FAA has defined two routes that you can take to overfly the river (along with a required training course you have to do before you fly it!) The low route (“Hudson River exclusion”) doesn’t have air traffic control services, and it’s quite busy with sightseeing helicopters. The slightly higher route (“Skyline route”) keeps you in contact with ATC. You’re allowed to do either route, as long as you follow the rules. Because we were leaving Teterboro, which is in controlled airspace, the easiest arrangement was to depart Teterboro with VFR flight following, fly the Skyline route while talking to the various air traffic domains, and then pick up an IFR clearance for the flight to Niagara. I had planned for us to leave Teterboro to the north, fly to the Alpine Tower, and then follow the river south down to the bay, turn around, and fly north on the east bank of the river. I attached a GoPro to the tail tiedown to capture it, and that was a great decision– the video looks terrific. The segment below is midflight– just before overflying the Verrazzano bridge and making the turn in the bay.

Originally, I wanted us to fly to the St Catherine’s airport on the Canadian side of the falls. I got a US customs sticker and did all the CANPASS paperwork (pro tip: send the paperwork to the British Columbia office, they’ll turn it around in a couple of days) in anticipation, but then I found out that St. Catherine’s is a limited-service airport. No rental cars, no real Uber service, and no tie-downs. Reluctantly, I instead planned to go to Niagara Falls International (KIAG), which turned out to be a perfectly nice airport. I had filed an IFR plan from Newark to Niagara, which I activated once we were off the Hudson skyline route. 1.9 hours of flying time total got us there just as the sun was setting, then we picked up our rental car and headed across the border.

Days 3-4: Niagara Falls

Since this is Flying Friday, I’ll confine my recap of our time in Niagara to the real highlights: seeing the falls from Maid of the Mist, eating donuts and wonton soup at Country Fresh, doing the free walking tour at Niagara-On-the-Lake, and touring the Niagara Parks Power Station. By design, we completely avoided all the tourist-trap stuff on Clifton Hill. We did an all-day bus tour that included the boat trip, a visit to the Skylon Tower, and lunch at the (I am not making this up) Hungry Moose.

apparently this is one of the most-photographed sights in the Niagara region

the views from the Skylon Tower were breathtaking

One thing I didn’t do: overfly the falls. You have to be at or above 3500′, and there’s a steady procession of sightseeing traffic right at 3500′. I didn’t think the sight would be all that great, so we skipped it.

Day 5: Niagara to Montpelier

When it was time to go, we crossed back over to the US side, handed the keys to our rental car to the friendly FBO staff, and headed out. Remember earlier how I talked about how ATC will just assign you whatever they want to? I had originally filed a route that I thought would keep me out of the military operating areas (MOAs) along my route (those brown polygons in the map extract below). What did ATC clear me for? A direct route. As soon as Niagara Approach handed me off to the next sector, guess what I heard? “N421BJ, I have an amendment to your route…” We ended up flying up and over the MOAs, but the girls were all heads-down reading and fiddling with their phones, and we had a nice tailwind, so no one except me cared.

Montpelier is an interesting little airport. It’s sited in some fairly high terrain, and if the weather had been IMC I probably would have just flown into Burlington instead. As it was, I passed Burlington just as an F35 was arriving, and there was quite a bit of other traffic in the area, so Montpelier worked out really well. We parked, shut down, and took off with my sister for lunch and some sightseeing, including the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour. (For discussion another time: our hilariously weird AirBnb in Montpelier and the steady parade of tour buses carrying leaf peepers.)

Day 6: Montpelier to Latrobe to Huntsville

I posted on BeechTalk to ask for route suggestions, and a couple of people recommended stopping at Latrobe, PA to eat at DeNunzio’s, the restaurant there. So we did! Our first leg was about 3.1 hours with a noticeable headwind, but nice clear skies and no hassle from ATC. After landing, we walked over to the restaurant and, reader, let me tell you: it was fantastic. I had the lasagna, and it was more than I could finish– which is pretty rare. The airplane and pax were both full, so off we went back into the headwinds, with increasing cloud coverage. The leg home took a little over 3 hours; we landed, unloaded, and gratefully made our way home to see the dogs.

Summary

This trip is a terrific example of how well GA can work for travel. It would have been both expensive and inconvenient to do a similar itinerary by commercial air, and I don’t even want to think about the hassle (and exhaustion) incumbent on driving a trip like this. In the end, I logged 14.2 hours total. I didn’t total up my fuel costs (which is a good thing; avgas is significantly more expensive in the northeastern US than it is where I usually fly), but I’d guesstimate it was probably about $1500. For that price, maybe I could have gotten us all to and from NYC. I’ll call this one a win, and I’m already looking forward to our next trip.

Flying Friday: A visit to RAM

I’m going to start this post with an apology: I should have taken about a million pictures, and now I’m sorry I didn’t. Now, on to the good stuff.

RAM Aircraft is really well known in the airplane engine aftermarket. They make engine parts (under what the FAA calls “PMA,” or “parts manufacturing approval“), including entire crankcases, and they have a very well-earned reputation for high-quality engine builds and overhauls. They sell a variety of upgrades for different aircraft, sadly not including my model of Baron, and they’ve been in the business since 1976, which is pretty rare in the aviation market.

They’re also a service center, and one of the things they do is what they call a “service check.” Think of the service check like the 14-point service that your local oil-change place does when you bring your car in; RAM’s service check includes an oil and filter change (including cutting the filter open to look for contamination or metal residue caused by unusual engine wear), but it goes well beyond that. They remove and clean the spark plugs, check the engine cylinder compressions, remove and clean the fuel injectors, adjust the fuel metering system to factory specs, test the intake and exhaust system for leaks, and wash the engine. If you bring in a twin-engine plane, they do all that twice… and, of course, they can fix any problems they find.

RAM were generous enough to donate a couple of gift certificates for service checks to the American Bonanza Society. I saw one for sale on BeechTalk and that sparked an idea: RAM is in Waco, Waco is near Dallas, I needed to be in Dallas for work, and I needed an oil change. What a happy chain of circumstances! I called RAM to schedule a service visit for when I needed to be in Dallas, bought the certificate and planned my trip: I’d fly the plane to Waco on Monday, drive back to Dallas for my meetings, and then pick the plane up on Thursday.

My flight to Waco was perfectly uneventful but hotter than blazes– it was 104º when I landed, and even at 3000′ it was still above 90º. In my particular airplane, temperatures above 90º on the ground call for a few differences in takeoff procedure, and climb performance (especially on one engine!) is significantly reduced, so I had to bear both of those in mind.

I landed and taxied over to the RAM ramp, and after a short wait John Sartor, RAM’s customer service manager, came out to meet me.

My personal opinion: you will never meet a more friendly or pleasant person in the aviation industry than John. He immediately made me feel like an honored customer even though he’d just met me 5 minutes before. After a short verification of what work RAM was going to do, we went out for me to show him my plane only to find that it had already been towed into the RAM hangar. That was a foretaste of how efficient their operation is! After verifying that he had the keys and access to the plane, he drove me to the Texas Aero FBO so I could pick up my rental car and I was off to Dallas.

The next morning, John called about 815a. I first though “oh no, something’s wrong”… but no, he was calling to tell me they’d already drained the oil and wanted to verify what oil I wanted to use. Efficiency again!

A later call brought the slightly unwelcome news that some of my spark plugs were worn to the point where the RAM QA department wouldn’t sign them off as airworthy. Aviation spark plugs are very similar in design to the ones in your car, lawn mower, boat, etc., but because piston aviation engines use leaded fuel, the plugs can foul faster, and over time the electrodes can wear. The electrodes on a few plugs were worn past their limits. A less conservative shop would have put the plugs back in and said “hey, you should change these,” but the good news is that RAM had the plugs in stock and changing them had zero labor cost.

Thursday morning John texted me to say the plane was ready, so after work I drove back to Waco (stopping at In-n-Out on the way, since I’d missed lunch). When I got there, he was kind enough to give me a 90-minute tour of their entire facility. The tour started in the lobby, where they have cutaway models of three engines with all the rotating parts intact. Turn the prop, and you can see the crankshaft turn, the movement of cylinders, camshafts, and valves, plus movement of the oil pump, turbocharger, alternator, and other accessories. The machinework on the models is amazing, and it was really fascinating to see the parts of the engine I don’t normally see.

We then made the rounds: the order and processing department, accounting (where I paid my bill, yikes), and the various assembly, test, and disassembly areas. The most junior RAM engine builder I met had been there 9 years. The most senior had been there 34 years! The shop spaces were meticulously organized and clean; the parts and tools were clearly labeled to keep the right things in the right places, and overall the impression I got was of a smooth-flowing workplace where people are expected to take time to do the work properly and to spec.

Each rebuild starts as a cart full of parts, so when the builder starts work, all of the components required for that particular engine are already together. There are a number of interesting touches to the build process, including custom-made carts that let them roll the engine from the build area into the (small, scary) elevator to take it down to the test cells. Those were cool too– in the cells, they do the engine break-ins for you, using a water dynamometer instead of a propeller or “club”. When the engine arrives it’s ready to be installed and flown, with no further break-in required. Considering that properly breaking in a new engine is a tricky process, this is a valuable addition. At the end of the process, there’s a hallway full of beautifully painted, perfectly clean, freshly rebuilt engines ready to go back into service.

I hated to leave, because I could’ve poked around all day asking questions and generally being a nuisance, but it was already after 5pm and I didn’t want to be that guy. I shook John’s hand, preflighted the plane (which had been fueled by Texas Aero while I was on tour), and blasted off for home. As one does, I kept a hawk eye on the engine parameters but they were refreshingly normal, and I landed about a half-hour after a beautiful sunset and went home happily.

Summary: if RAM rebuilt the kind of engines my plane has, I’d use them; if they support your engine type, you should take a very close look at them for repair / rebuild services. They do good work and they’re good people.

2023 Italy / Slovenia: Vipava to Kodreti

(see previous parts: part 0, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

Do you like touring vineyards? Then this stage of the hike will be perfect for you. I think we saw every vineyard in this part of Slovenia, plus a goodly number of churches. (It seems like every single ridge in Slovenia has a church on top of it, which is certainly scenic!) This route had some decent hills, with a mix of shade and full sun; combined, I’d have to say the en route segments felt like a bit more of a slog but the views and breaks were well worth it.

After a delicious breakfast buffet at the Koren Apartments, we set out through the town of Vipava, walking past a grocery store, a small car dealer, and some other trappings of industral civilization that had mostly been absent on our other routes. It wasn’t long before we were off the road and crossing a meadow which led to… a vineyard.

representative vineyard shot– I honestly disremember if this was the first one we saw that day or not

nice sample of the day’s terrain

vineyards love hills

We climbed through the small village of Lože, then walked into the slightly larger and fancier village of Goče. Our directions encouraged us to wander through the village (“it’s impossible to get lost!” it promised), so we did, walking up the hill to the 17th-century cemetery (which features a lovely garden, a welcome water faucet for refilling, and a set of kid-size soccer fields across the narrow street), then back down to Saint Andrew’s church in the village. Like most of the churches we saw on this trip, it was closed and we weren’t able to go in.

St Andrew’s of Goče

After Goče, it was over (and up!) to Erzelj. Along the way, we made another detour, with accompanying climb, to the Church of St Maria of the Snow, which featured some terrific views back over the valley (and its vineyards) over towards Goče. The church is about a kilometer off the road, so the out-and-back added a little distance but it was well worth it.

We briefly stopped in Erzelj, which had some kind of government building, with a small playground next to it, and a smattering of houses. Like the vast majority of the other villages, we saw no signs of life– no people, no cars, no roaming pets, nada. We did find a faucet to refill our water bottles, so we relaxed in the shade of the playground trees, had a small snack, and then set out for the next leg to Tabor, where we got some great views from the old village church.

After that stop, we just walked a bunch more, passing through a few small sub-villages. We passed through Kodreti, which is where our stop for the night was: Hiša posebne sorta, which is Slovene for “a special sort of house.” The hostess warmly welcomed us and showed us to our room, where I promptly cranked up the AC and sat for a few minutes to cool off before a quick shower, a cold beer on their shaded terrace, and an excellent 3-course dinner of soup, pork stuffed with plums and cheese, and some kind of magical dessert.

It’s true that hunger is the best sauce, but it’s also true that every dinner we had on this trip was a highlight. Then to bed to rest up for the next day’s hike.

2023 Italy / Slovenia: Hudičevic – Vipava

(see previous parts: part 0, part 1, part 2, part 3)

The big attraction of this day’s hike was the ability to climb up the ridge on Mount Nanos, which is actually a big limestone plateau and not a proper mountain. On one side it’s a huge mostly sheer set of cliffs, sort of like parts of Yellowstone, but those don’t photograph all that well with a cellphone camera. Here’s a small sample– note the exposed rock up at the top.

We didn’t climb all the way to the top, I regret to say

The hike started at a small church but, after a short walk to the trailhead, we were quickly headed uphill. We saw lots of people hiking down the trail, which explained the full parking lot at the trailhead. This made sense once we realized that it was still early and most of the hikers we saw had clearly gone out for a quick hike before it got too hot.

the initial trail was nicely wooded

The route instructions called for us to climb up to one of the designated waypoints, then decide if we wanted the main route or the one that went up on the ridge for better views. The trail was marked both with yellow arrows and small red-and-white marks that look like the Target logo, which were super helpful, and the turn-by-turn directions were also very detailed.

gorgeous smile, but also, did you see that little red-and-white trail marker?!

I was using the GPS map on my phone for route guidance, and Erica was cross-checking with the printed directions. This system worked pretty well for us, except in this one specific case. See, the directions basically said “for the main route, do X, Y, Z” for, oh, maybe 8 pages. At the end of that section, it then said “and if you want to climb the ridge, instead of Y, do P, D, and Q.” So we missed the turn onto the ridge route at first, and didn’t realize it until we were well along the main route.

Erica kept the printed directions handy

We didn’t notice because of two reasons. First was that we were hearing voices… really. Somewhere in the valley below is a motorsports track, and we could hear roaring engines and the track announcer. There was too much foliage alongside the trail for us to directly see the track but we could definitely hear it. The other is that the trail we were on was marked; I just didn’t notice the aforementioned split in the before/after directions until we were quite some distance in.

Luckily, the AllTrails map showed all of the trails in the area, not just the ones we were on. We found a side trail that angled off about 45º to our track and that joined the marked route for the ridge. This trail didn’t have as many of the trail markers as I would have liked, so we made a couple of wrong turns. Sadly, each of those wrong turns involved a steep climb, followed by puzzlement, swearing, and backtracking. Eventually we found the correct path, which linked up with the ridge route, and we got some of the promised amazing views.

off to the right is our destination, the village of Vipava

The path eventually ran alongside a small road, with lots of switchbacks; in one of those switchbacks we found a shaded bench to sit on for lunch. There I had one of the best lunches I can remember: there was a small water trough with fresh, and extremely cold, water, an amazing view shared with my lovely wife, and a delicious lunch consisting of farm-fresh fruit and sandwiches, on homemade bread, of local cheese, uncured ham, and… wait for it… donkey salami.

Yes, you read that right.

It was very tasty. Sorry, Eeyore.

Anyway, after an amazing lunch, it was back onto the trail. We moved into a more forested area, with the highlight being a stop at the Church of St. Niklaus, which dates back at least to 1608. We couldn’t go in, but I did manage to ring the church bells. At first I tried using a tree branch, but after a little research, I found the bamboo rod, with a convenient hook on the end, that was meant for bell-ringing, so I gave it a try. (annoyingly, I can’t make WordPress uncrop the video, the dirty rats. Watch it full-screen if you actually want to see the bells.)

Ring out, wild bells. Or something.

That probably isn’t allowed, so we fled the area fairly quickly, only to find out that we were in an old artillery range that used to be used by the Yugoslavian army back in the day. We didn’t think it was in time of shooting, so we pressed on.

This part of the trail was neat because to our right we had the sheer faces of Nanos, and between that and the trail were large fields of scree and gravel. Clearly rock had fallen down off the face and been weathered into smaller and smaller pieces before it ended up underfoot. You could see spots on the face where a large rock had broken off and fallen, then the fallen rock itself… sort of like those maps of Pangaea that show the primordial continent evolving into today’s arrangement. The path was mostly trending downhill, and soon enough we came out of the forest and found a lovely oasis in the form of Kamp Tura. This is, essentially, a Slovene KOA, with spots for tents or campers, a shower house and bathrooms, sports courts, and a nice little cafe where I drank two brain-freezingly cold Coke Zeros while we chatted with Bojena, one of the owners.

Pro tip: on the entire trip we found approximately zero public restrooms. That turned out not to be a problem because it was so hot that we didn’t need any pee breaks en route, but you should plan accordingly if you do this route in less-sweaty conditions.

After Kamp Tura, it was an easy downhill leg through some vineyards and past what looked like a Soviet-era industrial complex (but which turned out to be a winery!) before we got into Vipava itself. Vipava’s a real town, with a few restaurants and bars on the town square. On Foot had booked us into a very nice little tourist apartment; after checking in, cranking up the AC, and doing a little sink laundry, we headed out to try to find a wine tasting. The only problem is, the nearest winery was a couple of miles away uphill– and there are no taxis in or around Vipava. So that was right out. Luckily, the family that operates the apartments also runs a small winery, Wipach, and there’s a small wine shop on the ground floor. We had an amazing tasting hosted by one of the winery owners, a charming schoolteacher who runs the winery with her husband. She’s the grand-daughter of one of the winery’s two founders and her husband is the grandson of the other founder… so it’s absolutely a family concern.

After the tasting, we got cleaned up for dinner. Our apartment hostess had asked if we liked pizza; when we said “yes,” that’s what we were expecting. Instead…

what kind of soup is that? wrong answers only.

…she booked us a table at Gostilna Podfarovz, where we had an amazing dinner consisting of, well, I’m not really sure. The photo above is our soup: cucumber and zucchini cold soup with kefir on top, and some kind of little puffy thing with raspberry balls on it. There was a course of trout tartare and beef tartare; there was lamb; there were various other odd combinations of ingredients that I would never have ordered but which I was happy to eat. In fact, they fed us so much that we had to decline dessert. All throughout dinner we saw people walking by with ice cream, and we kept joking about how good ice cream would be before bed… except we just didn’t have room.

Full of lamb-trout-mystery-food, we went back to the apartment to make an early-ish night of it; the next day’s segment was going to be hilly and hot without a lot of shade so we wanted an early start.

2023 Italy / Slovenia: hiking part 1, Landol-Hudičevic

(see previous parts: part 0, part 1, part 2)

Not surprisingly at all, we both woke up before the alarm– neither of us wanted to be late to meet our driver. Our B&B had the convenient feature of allowing you to pre-order breakfast, so promptly at 0730 we went out to the terrace and had an amazing breakfast of fresh-baked bread, local meats and cheeses, local honey, and locally-farmed eggs. This set the pattern for our hiking, where I can only think of one store-bought or processed item (a pot of fruit yogurt) that we were even offered. Plus, the coffee was delicious.

For this hiking route, On Foot had arranged a driver to take us to Landol, the first waypoint on our hike. We’d prearranged with the driver to divert and stop at the famous cave system at Postojna. To tour the caves, you ride an underground railway for 10 minutes or so, then take a walking tour through the cave system itself. I do love a good cave, and this one was fantastic– the cave system itself goes on for kilometers, as a result of the limestone terrain that’s easily infiltrated and undercut by water. As with our other cave visits, cellphone pictures don’t really do justice to the sights, so I didn’t take a lot of pictures.

From our dropoff point in Landol, our first waypoint was the castle at Predjama, which was good because we both wanted to see it. Predjama is about 10km from Postojna and maybe 4km from Landol, so the first leg was pretty easy. Predjama literally means “in front of the cave,” and when you look at the pictures you can see why. The castle itself is built into the side of a cliff and extends into a pre-existing cave system.

Predjama is uniquely sited in the side of a cliff

The castle definitely has a tourist-y vibe; there’s an available audio tour, lots of placards, and some samples of armor, weaponry, etc. The presented history emphasizes the role of Erasmus, the robber-baron-knight of the area, which was a nifty story I didn’t previously know.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair… oops, wrong castle

After the castle visit, we had lunch at one of the restaurants– I had a giant schnitzel and a half-liter of Union beer, just to make sure I was getting enough salt, fat, and alcohol on board before the real hike started. Then… we started walking.

The hike itself was just under 7.5 miles, all over mixed terrain: some meadows, some wooded trails, some climbs, a few descents, a little gravel. The below route map from Strava should give you some idea; this was a relatively flat course that didn’t have a lot in the way of stunning views, but it did have some lovely scenery.

a quiet forested trail is good for the soul

It was a lovely day to be out in the countryside

One thing the On Foot guide had prepared us to expect was the presence of monuments in each village. When you think “village” you may be assuming something larger than the typical Slovenian village– the entire country has only about 2 million people, half of whom live in Ljubljana and other cities. A village there might be no more than half-a-dozen houses clustered near each other, but I think every one we went to had at least one shrine, plus a monument to partisans killed resisting the Nazis in World War II.

Another welcome feature of the villages: they usually had someplace to refill our water bottles. Erica had gotten us a pair of collapsible LifeStraw bottles for our Belize trip, and they were perfect for this trip. We didn’t need the filtering, since Slovenian tap water is as safe to drink as in America, but being able to collapse them was handy. Our day pack weighed maybe 15 lb and contained the two LifeStraw bottles, an extra 1.5L of bottled water, our lunches, snacks, a small first aid kit, rain jackets, maps, and a few other odds and ends.

On the drive to Postojna, our guide said that Slovenia is famous for having more tractors than cars. I can’t assess whether that’s true but we did see rather a lot of tractors, including this beauty. We saw plenty of them, both parked in barns but also working in the fields.

After a pleasant, but hot, hike, we made it to Hudičevic, which means “the hidden devil.” There’s a local legend about a mean old washerwoman who was taken ill. As she lay on her deathbed, the local priest dressed up as the devil to try to frighten her into accepting last rites. Thinking he was the actual devil, she shot him. (coolStoryBro.jpg) Hudičevic is a tourist farm operated by the son and daughter-in-law of the original founders, the Simčič family, who opened in 1970 as an inn to feed the workers who were building the nearby motorway. The couple’s 10 kids all live and work at the farm, which was pretty neat. Our room was small and nicely furnished; although it didn’t have air conditioning, as the evening cooled it was quite nice. Dinner, and the next day’s breakfast and lunch, were all locally produced. Although the menu offered both donkey salami and horse salami, we decided to stick with more traditional fare. I had pork loin stuffed with cheese and plums, along with a thick vegetable soup and a delicious berry dessert with fresh homemade ice cream. Erica had lamb.

We both slept very well and enjoyed a fantastic breakfast buffet; whichever kid was working in the kitchen also packed us each a sack lunch, then Klara drove us into the village for the day’s route.

that wasn’t the mountain we climbed but it’s a decent stand-in

2023 Italy / Slovenia: Ljubljana

(see previous parts: part 0, part 1)

There’s no great way to get from Venice to Ljubljana by air or train, so I decided to book us on Flixbus. The bus left from the Venice central station, which wasn’t far from our hotel. We took a taxi after the first two city buses we wanted didn’t show up. When we got to the station, it was like being in an anthill– tons of people, all milling around in unpredictable patterns. I was getting a little panicky because the bus wasn’t anywhere to be found at the specified location, but we eventually found a queue of other people who were waiting for the same bus, and it showed up about 15 minutes later.

Pro tip: Italian train/bus stations have pay toilets. Take a couple of €1 coins, just in case.

For about €40, we had a clean, safe, quiet, and comfortable 3-hour bus ride. Both of us were surprised at how quiet the atmosphere on the bus was– much quieter than a typical commercial airline flight. Flixbus bought Greyhound in the US, which I didn’t know, so maybe “riding the dog” will come back. It’s hard to beat the price. When we arrived in Ljubljana, we quickly found our way to Pension Slamič, our lodging for the night. It was much nicer than I had expected– a modern, clean, quiet hotel only a few blocks’ walk from Old Town. After checkin, we headed out to see some sights and immediately fell in love with how walkable that area of Ljubljana is. Big, wide sidewalks, with bike paths and plenty of trees, make it easy to get around comfortably. We found a post office and bought some postcard stamps, then found a Spar and bought a few extra bottles of water for the hike. Because we’d missed lunch thanks to being on the bus, our first important stop was dinner at Patrón for tacos. This might seem like a weird choice but having tacos in foreign lands is kind of our thing, and I’m really glad we did it here. The fish taco I had was one of the best I’ve ever enjoyed anywhere, and the carnitas taco was as good as anything I’ve cooked myself. We enjoyed sitting out on the street and people watching for a while, then set out to go hit our major objectives.

wish I’d noticed how blurry this was before I ate the tacos

Ljubljana has (at least) two well-known bridges: the Dragon Bridge and the Triple Bridge. You can probably guess how they got their names…

here there be dragons

The old city itself isn’t that large, so we made a circuit across the bridges and then climbed the hill to the castle, which is a really interesting tourist-ized version of its former self. There are several exhibits and museums in it, including a really interesting section dedicated to Slovenian history, a topic as complex as you’d expect from a central European country that’s been passed around from empire to empire over the centuries. There’s a nice mix of original and restored structures and artifacts, and you can climb the clock tower to look out over the city.

the castle overlooks Ljubljana and the surrounding area

After our castle visit, we only had one more planned stop: the rooftop bar at the Nebotčnik. This was lively, even at 6pm, and we had to wait a few minutes for a table, but the views were worth it. I had some kind of cocktail which appeared to be a glass of Windex, and we split two delicious pieces of cake.

After our rooftop visit, we headed back to Slamič to make sure our day pack was ready for the following day’s hike, then hit the bed early.

2023 Italy / Slovenia: Venice part 1

(see previous parts: part 0)

I’d booked us at the Hilton Garden Inn Venice Mestre.

Yes, that’s right… in one of the most romantic, most iconic cities in the world, we weren’t even staying in the fun part, and were in a chain hotel to boot. But before you get too out of sorts, consider that the stay was free (thanks to Hilton points) and that there’s a bus stop within about 25′ of the front door. At that stop, you can take a €1.50 bus ride for 10 minutes and be in Venice, or at the central station downtown, or at the airport, all of which we needed. Overall I was really pleased with the hotel, although it was absolutely jam-packed with tour and cruise-ship passengers. It was exactly what you’d expect from a Hilton property: clean, well-maintained, with decent amenities and a friendly, competent staff. We weren’t going to be there much anyway!

After dropping off our bags and a quick shower, we grabbed the bus to Venice and started, well, just wandering around. Let me stipulate once that it was super hot (88+ ºF) and very crowded the entire time we were in Venice. That way I don’t have to repeat it. Neither of us loves crowds, but that’s par for the course when traveling in Europe now. Anyway…

One of many bridges

Pretty much exactly what you’d think Venice looks like

Traffic, Venice-style

We didn’t have a real plan, so we just walked around. We managed to find some gelato for a mid-afternoon snack, as one does, and it was just as good as we both had imagined real Italian gelato would be. However, we had bigger plans for dinner– Erica had booked us a cichetti tour. If, like me, you have no idea what cichetti are, or is, or whatever: think “Italian tapas.”

The tour was superb. Our guide, Sylvia, was both a certified sommelier and an art historian; she moonlights as a tour guide. As we walked, she explained that Venetian nightlife centers around meeting your friends for small-plate snacking and drinking, in a sort of progressive-dinner style… thus the tour.

Sylvia with a tray of baccalà

Each of the places we stopped had a different specialty. At the first stop, we were served small fried-tuna balls, fritto misto (mixed fried seafood), and squid cooked in squid ink (not a favorite for either of us.)

fritto misto in the front, squid-in-ink in the back

At other stops, we had baccalà (shown above– basically, dried fish which is then boiled to make a sort of cream and served on toast; I liked it, but Erica didn’t as much); a sort of Uncrustable-like sandwich whose name I forget, risotto, and the best tiramisu I’ve ever had in my whole life. The risotto and tiramisu were at a place called Sepa, where I would 100% return if I were to find myself in Venice again. Each place served us prosecco, wine, or some other kind of drink, too. Our tour group was mostly Americans, along with an Australian mother-and-daughter pair, but it was fun to see the varying levels of adventurousness as we tried different types of cichetti.

I’m not normally a big tiramisu fan, but this was one of the best desserts I’ve ever had in my life, and I eat a LOT of desserts

By the time we got done with the tour, it was twilight, we were jetlagged, and we were stuffed full of food, so we headed back to the hotel (again on the bus) and called it a night. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO. What we really did was take the bus to the airport to get Erica’s suitcase, an adventure in forced wakefulness and Italian standards of customer service that I won’t detail here to spare your delicate eyes, dear reader. Then we went back to the hotel to sleep.

The next morning we bolted down a quick hotel breakfast and grabbed the bus again for what would prove to be a super full day of sight seeing. The weather had changed a little overnight– it was overcast and occasionally raining, but we grabbed our rain jackets and headed to the bus stop anyway. This turned out to be a great decision, because the rain kept a lot of the tourists off the streets (at least at first).

not about to let the rain… uh, dampen… our fun

I am told that this boat is a Venice landmark

We had a very pleasant time just walking around but the rain intensified. Coincidentally we were near Ca’ Rezzonico, billed as the only museum dedicated to 18th-century Venice, so we went in to tour. It was fabulous! Paintings by Tiepolo, Tintoretto, and more; amazing frescoes; statuary; sumptuous decorations; and lots more. I didn’t expect to enjoy it, or find it as educational, as I did, and it hadn’t even made our short list of must-do items. We wandered around until we had seen everything we wanted to, then headed over to St. Mark’s Square, where we had timed tickets for the bell tower and the basilica.

Pro tip: St. Mark’s is always going to be crowded. Just mentally prepare yourself. It didn’t help that there was construction all over the place, but that’s also part of the price to be borne for being able to see centuries-old monuments in situ; sometimes they need maintenance.

I didn’t take many pictures inside St. Mark’s proper, knowing that a cellphone camera wouldn’t do them justice. I did take several from the campanile and the balcony with the four horses, though.

well, OK, maybe just one…

The campanile from the outside

Pro tip: 100% do not go to St. Mark’s unless you have bought tickets with the “skip the line” option, in advance. Don’t count on tickets being available same-day.

After St. Mark’s, we headed some distance away to have lunch. Erica had previously found recommendations for Osteria Alla Staffa, which was superb. The food was excellent and the service was warm, friendly, and fast. We chatted with a couple from LA who were in Venice as part of their honeymoon, and it was fun to compare notes. Then it was off to the Contarini del Bovolo (Italian for “snail”), where we had a 4pm ticket, for more unique views.

St Mark’s campanile from atop the Bovolo staircase

We hadn’t planned it in advance, but we decided to take a water taxi over to San Giorgio Maggiore. This requires us to go back through St. Mark’s, which was even more crowded than before lunch, then figure out which boat to take. Long story short, we took a bit of a detour to Giudecca before ending up at the desired spot. The views were very well worth it, though.

After another water taxi ride back to Venice proper, we stopped at a handy cafe for, you guessed it, more gelato. On the way back to the hotel, we decided to have a proper dinner, by which I mean “pizza,” during which we were serenaded by an honest-to-goodness accordionist. That was a first. The pizza was great though. Then we caught the bus back to the hotel to pack up and get ready for the next day’s trip to Ljubljana.

note the musician in the background

Venice has a view like this around practically every corner.

2023 Italy / Slovenia: part 0 (planning and travel)

Erica and I do love a good adventure. After doing the Bermuda Challenge and Ragnar New England, we decided maybe it would be fun to have an active vacation that wasn’t focused on running. “How about a multi-day hike?” she asked me one day. “Suuuuure,” I said, envisioning a week-plus of sleeping in a tent (something I got my fill of in the Marine Corps). She did some research and came back with a terrific suggestion: On Foot Holidays, a UK company that arranges cross-country hikes with lodging at each point. In particular, she suggested we look at their route in Slovenia, which covered six nights starting in Ljubljana and ending in Trieste. This was especially attractive since neither of us had been to either Italy or Slovenia before. Each day was a separate point-to-point hike, with lodging arranged, and On Foot would handle moving our luggage for us.

We signed up and started digging into the logistics of traveling from Huntsville to Ljubljana. Let’s just say that the process wasn’t entirely straightforward. Erica had built up a great stash of Chase Ultimate Rewards points and wanted to use them, so she started hunting for flights. We ended up with great points deals to go from Miami to Venice on Air France, and from Venice direct to Newark on United. I booked Delta mileage tickets from Huntsville to Miami and from JFK back home, and then the real fun started. First Air France cancelled the Miami-Paris leg and moved it a couple of days, so I got to call AF and get that all straightened out. That change necessitated changing our Delta flights too, but when the dust settled, we had a fairly simple Huntsville-Atlanta-Paris-Venice routing.

On Foot provided us a thick packet of maps and guidance well in advance of the trip. Each day of the hike had its own topographic map and printed set of very detailed turn-by-turn directions, along with a summary itinerary telling us where we’d be staying and what to see/do in each location and a detailed packing list. They also gave us a single GPX file that had all of the GPS routes in it (more on that in a future post!) The On Foot team communicated frequently and clearly throughout the pre-game process, including assigning us a local contact that we could use if we got lost, stuck, or puzzled. That left us free to concentrate on planning the Venice and Trieste stays, since we could trust that On Foot had arranged lodging and food. As usual, Erica did an amazing job of identifying things we might want to do and organizing and arranging them. We had nearly two days in Venice on arrival, followed by a day in Trieste and two more days in Venice after the hike, and that led to a jam-packed schedule of things to do, see, and eat.

Our travel started out as completely unexceptional. The friendly Delta ticket agent figured out that he could check our bags straight to Venice even though we had separate Delta and Air France tickets; once that was done, we flew to Atlanta, had a snack at the Sky Club, changed planes, and settled in for the long-haul flight to Paris. The flight featured a toddler in the row in front of us who cried, whined, and, at one point, spit a mouthful of cracker over the two of us. It was just exactly as much fun as you’d expect, but we got to Paris undaunted, changed planes again, and then arrived in Venice.

Delta had a large, and rather patriotic, display in the Atlanta Sky Club

Of course, when we got to Venice, only one of us got a suitcase. We’d checked two bags. Mine went from Huntsville to Atlanta to Venice, all on Delta flights. Erica’s went from Huntsville to Atlanta to Paris to Venice, also all on Delta flights. Notice that we didn’t take those flights. Why did our bags take different flights from us? Why were they different from each other? Heaven knows. We filled out the you-lost-my-bag form, stood in an interminable line, and learned that Erica’s bag would arrive that evening but after the cutoff for bag delivery, meaning that if she wanted it that night, we’d have to go back to the airport to get it. Resigned to that fate, we grabbed a cab to our hotel to get ready for visiting Venice proper…

Ragnar 2023 New England

(note: this post contains no jokes about Boston accents or use of the word “wicked.”)

Back in 2017, I ran my first long-distance relay race, American Odyssey. Then this year, I did it again. Instead of Gettysburg-to-DC, this route was from Groton, CT to Quincy, MA, but it featured some of the same players.

See, what had happened was: Erica and I were just finishing our beer 5K and she got a text from her friend Kim, who’s captained multiple Ragnar teams before and got our team recruited into American Odyssey. She had some openings for Ragnar New England, and were we interested? Erica certainly was, but I had a business trip to Copenhagen planned that weekend. However, a little poking around on Google Flights showed that I could combine the two, so off we went.

Ragnar races are typically about 36-hour events. The team size can vary, but it’s most common to have a team of 12, divided into two vans of 6 runners each. Each run leg varies from about 4 miles to 7 or more; the idea is that runner 1 from van 1 runs, and van 1 drives to the exchange point at the end of that leg. When runner 1 arrives, runner 2 starts out, and so on. While 1 van is running, the other can be sleeping, sightseeing, etc.

Van 1 consisted of team captain Kim and her husband Tim, plus multiple-Ragnar veterans Travis and Ciri Corbin and their son Devin (another multi-Ragnar finisher), an active duty airman. Van 2 was me and Erica and two other couples from Huntsville, Megan and Zach and Amanda and John. I knew Amanda, and Erica knew Megan, and Amanda, John, Megan, and Zach all knew each other.

We arrived in Boston on Thursday midday and Kim and Ciri picked us up at the airport. Kim had arranged an Airbnb in Plymouth with enough sleeping space for the 11 of us, so after a quick stop for a sandwich and a beer, we headed to the house to drop off our bags. Some teams sleep in their vans but that just sounds (and smells!) terrible. The house was terrific– big kitchen, 4 bathrooms, 6 bedrooms, a hot tub, and full-size arcade games in the basement. Better yet, it was located so that the van that wasn’t running could drive there in a reasonable time between legs.

After the bag drop, we walked around Plymouth proper, including visiting Plymouth Rock (which is a lot smaller than I expected) and taking some pictures of the Mayflower II, a full-size replica that is still terrifyingly small.

The Rockets in our Pockets team, minus Devin, plus the Mayflower II

Imagine crossing the Atlantic in that thing

Kim had booked us dinner at a nearby restaurant, which was great for team socialization.

This time Ciri got to have selfie-arm and stand out in front

Of course I had to have lobster, in this case a delicious lobster mac-and-cheese. Extra credit to Sea Dog Brewing for their blueberry ale and their hilarious logo. Both the beer and the entree were delicious.

It’s traditional to decorate team vans, so after we walked back to the house, we got started on that. Our van was labeled “VAN HALEN” across the front (team 1 was “VAN MORRISON”) and then we started adding random pictures and text, each according to our own artistic abilities.

Megan is really excited that I’m writing “Слава Україні!” on the van

Erica carefully drawing the Rockets In Our Pockets logo

After the decorations were finally done, we all trooped off to bed. The race start was 9a Friday for van 1, but the start point was about a 90-minute drive away. Van 2 needed to be at the exchange point (“exchange 6”) around noon to check in, pick up our road-safety flags, and stage runner #7 (that would be me) for the run leg. This gave van 2 a little extra leisure time, but we’d be paying for it overnight Friday.

nearly the full team, including Kim’s rocket costume, at exchange 6

We met up with everyone at exchange 6 and checked in. You may notice in the picture above that we’re missing someone– that would be Travis, who was out running leg 6. As soon as he came in, I started out on my first leg, which was #7 overall. Because the race segments are built around 12-person teams, I also had legs 19 and 31. Erica got to be our anchor runner, so she had 12, 24, and the finishing leg, 36.

The exact start time for each subsequent leg would vary according to the runner’s pace; Ragnar provides a pace calculator sheet but it was pretty quickly evident that we had some sandbaggers. Both Devin and Zach ran much faster than predicted, and most of the rest of us were a little faster (at least on some legs). Shout out to Kim for being precisely on her predicted pace, even though she ran double legs to make up for us being one runner short.

My first leg started at Misquamicut State Beach in Rhode Island and covered a little over 7 miles. I ran right on-pace and enjoyed the sunshine enough that I took off my shirt about halfway. It was mid-60s with a nice breeze– the perfect weather for a leisurely run along the coast.

it feels good to be a gangster

After I tagged our next runner out, we went in search of lunch, first stopping for a quick coffee pickup at one of the ubiquitous Dunkin Donuts found everywhere throughout New England. Rural Rhode Island isn’t exactly overrun with restaurant options, and we didn’t have a lot of time, so we found a small grocery store with a deli and bought sandwiches, then ate them in the van while heading to the next exchange point.

van #2, on the go to pick up Zack

This pattern continued until we met up with van 1 again at exchange 12– Erica finished her leg, tagged Tim with the relay wristband, and then the rotation started over. That left van 2 free to go back to the house; we had about 3.5 hours before the projected start time for my next leg, but about 1.5 hours of that was eaten up by driving from exchange 12 to the house. When we got back, after a quick shower, I went immediately to sleep with an alarm set for 1120pm. When it went off, I blearily got up, got dressed, and met the team in the kitchen for our departure to exchange 18, where I would start on leg 7.

If you haven’t ever run in the middle of the night, let me tell you… it’s weird. It’s not just the darkness, nor the reduced activity in your surroundings. At least for me, it’s like my body knows it’s supposed to be asleep and just acts uncooperatively. My leg started at a middle school and ended at a high school, which meant I was running through mostly neighborhoods. The night was quiet, still, and cool, and in some spots the only real light was what was coming from my headlamp. It was a little spooky. After my exchange, we continued through the night, with Erica taking the last leg that finished a little after dawn.

one of our exchanges was this lovely little church

After Erica finished leg 24, we loaded up the van for the short drive back to the house. Because our team had put another ~30 miles on the odometer since the start of my leg 19, we were quite a bit closer to the house. After another turbo shower, I was sound asleep until the alarm went off, at whatever time that was, and we loaded up for the drive to exchange 30. That whole process was a little bit of a blur.

Unsurprisingly, my third leg was the most difficult– I was tired, of course, but it was also hillier than either of the first two legs, and I didn’t love the course. For much of the 7 miles, I was running on the side of the road with no shoulder or sidewalk, with lots of hills and blind curves. There were some fun sights to see en route, though.

but why?

the real ones know

moments of beauty and tranquility in the midst of all the sweat

After the exchange, we found a small coffee shop for breakfast and went on with our pickup routine. The skies continued to darken and it became clear that it was going to rain– the forecast had called for rain after 3pm, but the forecast time of the rain’s start varied throughout the weekend. The bottom line is that our last three runners got rained on, and poor Erica was inundated. She had to run the finishing leg in a hard, steady, chilly rain, and she did it without a word of complaint. This didn’t surprise me, since she’s the same athlete who ran the last leg of American Odyssey on a bothersome knee in 85° heat, but I was proud of her.

Finally, the finish… I wish I could write about how great the finish-line ceremony was, but it was lame. Because it was still raining heavily, there were no spectators; every team that had already finished got their medals and took off. There was no free food or beer, as promised (I guess the vendors took off?) but we didn’t mind, because we didn’t want to hang around anyway.

that’s one for the books!

the idea of a waterside finish was great, but the implementation, not so much

Instead of going out to celebrate, we made the consensus decision to order pizza. This turned out to be a brilliant choice– everyone had time to get a hot shower and dry clothes, plus hot tub time, and then we sat around visiting and eating pizza. I don’t think anyone stayed up very late; Erica, Tim, and Kim had early flights on Sunday, and I carpooled with them since I was flying to Copenhagen later. I figured I could drop my luggage and go see some sights.

As it turns out, Sunday morning is a terrible time to see sights in Boston because things are either closed because it’s Sunday or closed because it’s early. For example, the Old North Church has services all morning, so you can’t tour it; the Boston Fire Museum is closed, and so on. I walked around a bunch in the sunshine, had Mexican street cod at Legal Sea Foods, and then went back to the airport for my flight.

Overall, the race was a blast. I got to meet some interesting and fun people, listen to some great new music (thanks to John and Zach), run in some places I hadn’t been before, and have yet another adventure with my favorite adventure partner. All in all, a great weekend, and I’d do another Ragnar with this group any time, anywhere.

Belize 2023

Once upon a time…

Erica and I had planned a trip to visit Belize in March 2020. This, obviously, did not happen; we tried postponing it to December 2020, which also didn’t happen. We postponed a couple more times and then decided to “do it later.” Well, now it’s later.

Getting there was fairly straightforward: Delta flies to Belize City, and they had frequent-flyer seats available. It’s about a three-hour flight from Atlanta to Belize City, with one flight per day. We booked tickets and then started on the detailed planning– 90% of which Erica did– for a weeklong trip. Our flight down was uneventful and we arrived in Belize City about noon. Delta only operates a 737-800 on this route, so it’s not fancy by any means. The airport is small and noisy, with lots and lots of duty-free space relative to its size. (Liquor is expensive in Belize, so if you’re a heavy drinker, stock up at the airport.)

We’d booked a shuttle to take us up to San Ignacio, close to the border with Guatemala. It was US $120 and a roughly two-hour drive; for the first hour, there’s not much to see, but it gets more interesting as you go further west. Erica had used a stash of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, which she transferred to Hyatt, to book us at the Ka’ana in San Ignacio, a small but extremely nice resort that served as our base for the first part of our trip. The resort is about a 5min drive outside San Ignacio proper– a little too far to walk. It’s beautifully landscaped, with about two dozen rooms laid out around a central area with a pool and a combined reception/bar/restaurant. There’s a helipad (seriously… but don’t get too excited, it’s a stone “H” laid into a grass field) and a small organic farm that provides much of the produce used in the restaurant.

After checkin, we hit the pool, which is small but lovely, and ordered a poolside lunch. Spoiler alert: the pool has iguanas, and they will steal your lunch if given the chance. We saw the first iguana as we lounged, but as soon as the food came out, there were suddenly more of them, and they weren’t shy at all about climbing on tables or lounge chairs. Erica eventually finished her sandwich in the middle of the pool to keep it safe from their depredations.

this guy was not dissuaded by being threatened with a flip-flop

Dinner was at the hotel restaurant, which was oddly empty– there were only 2 other couples dining. We ate there each night; as you’d expect there were a few staple dishes (grilled stuffed chicken breast, various steaks) and some daily selections. All of them were quite good; none of them were so good that I’d rave about them here.

The next morning, we were up early for breakfast. Our room included continental breakfast, which you can pre-order, but the selections were a little different than a US hotel: oatmeal, sure, and a fruit plate, but also what the hotel called johnnycakes but what an American would call biscuits, served with delicious local cheese and refried beans.

Breakfast delivery meant we had time to eat before leaving for our tour of the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) cave, which we’d booked with MayaWalk. They picked us up from the hotel, and after a short wait at their office in San Ignacio we met up with the rest of our group and headed out on the 45-minute drive to the cave.

Summary: ATM is an amazing experience. It was made all the better by our guide Magdaleno, who was both knowledgeable and passionate about the history of el mundo Maya. He did a fantastic job of explaining the significance of the artifacts and remains in the cave itself, outlining what is known (versus what’s conjectured) about Mayan culture and civilization, and guiding us through the cave. The tour itself starts at a parking lot, where after a very short walk you ford a chest-deep river.

Crossing the river at the start of the ATM tour

Getting to the cave entails two more shallow river crossings and about a 1.5mi hike on a mostly-flat, mostly-dirt, mostly-shaded path. Once you get to the cave, you swim in and the real fun starts.

This is where you swim into the cave

We’d read tons of reviews of the cave experience, many of which highlighted how difficult it was. In reality, though, it was about a 5 on a scale of 1-10 for us. There was some climbing on and over rocks, and a few tight passages that required gyrations and contortions, but all easily managed. We saw one small clutch of roosting bats and one really impressive spider, plus all the usual beauty and grandeur of a large cave system. What sets ATM apart is its history as a sacred ceremonial space; there are multiple sets of human remains along the path, along with lots of ceremonial pottery. The tour culminates with climbing an extension ladder to the Cave of the Crystal Maiden, which is an unforgettable sight that unfortunately I couldn’t capture on my own. Cameras aren’t allowed in the cave because of damage caused by prior clumsy visitors, so the cave pictures we have come from MayaWalk’s archive. There are other restrictions (part of the tour must be done in socks, without shoes, for example) but nothing onerous.

After the tour, MayaWalk had catered a lunch of stewed chicken, rice, and beans, which we eagerly ate before the ride back to the hotel. Then it was time for another visit to the pool, as one does. Because of Erica’s status with Hyatt, the hotel offered to upgrade us a slightly nicer room that had its own private patio and tub, so we moved our stuff over and unpacked our $5 Walmart pool floats for the afternoon before enjoying dinner in the hotel again.

Our upgraded back deck

What did we do the next day? Not a darn thing except floating in the pool. I read two books, took pictures of some birds, drank several local beers, watched the iguanas, and generally just relaxed.

The hotel had a pretty good assortment of local birds to watch, including this collared aracari.

The two predominant local beers are Belikin and 501. I liked both, but liked their stout better than their lager.

OK, so maybe I wasn’t only looking at the birds, but can you blame me?

Wednesday morning we had an earlier wakeup so that we could take a tour of the ruins at Tikal. This required more driving than ATM, so we needed an earlier start. The MayaWalk driver picked us up as before and took us to the office to meet up with our group, and off we went. It was just us and one other couple (two lovely Brits now living just outside Quebec City). We made one stop en route at a local shop, which had a pretty impressive scale model of the Tikal complex. The model below shows the full extent of the complex, but not all of it is visible when you get there– more on that in a bit.

scale model of the Tikal complex as it might have looked when inhabited

The total drive there took about 90 minutes. Part of it is inside the boundaries of the park; you pass through a big gate that looks, no kidding, much like the famous gate from Jurassic Park. After we parked, we started exploring the complex. It covers an area of about 16 square kilometers; as you walk through on the provided paths, you can see the tops of some of the larger buildings, but many of the smaller buildings just look like tree-covered mounds.

as you walk through the complex sights like this are common

This is on purpose; if you remove the trees and vegetation from these structures, you’d also be removing some of the support that holds them together, not to mention exposing them more to erosion and water damage. The complex has been thoroughly mapped using both radar and lidar, which is where the layout in the diorama above came from. Some of the structures are open to the public, including Temple IV and most of the complex known as the Mundo Perdido (“Lost World”).

view from high up in the main plaza

view from inside a dwelling room, featuring the characteristic triangular “Mayan arch”

you can’t really judge the scale of these monuments until you’re there

It’s pretty astonishing to wander around the complex and picture the amount of effort and knowledge that went into building these structures: all by hand, with very limited tools, in a place with no nearby rivers or lakes (so limited supplies of water). There was a lot of specialized knowledge involved, too. Our guide told us the story of one structure that was restored by a team from the University of Pennsylvania but that had to be re-restored– the UPenn team made the structure too straight and level, so it was eroding much faster than expected because rainfall pooled instead of running off the side of the uneven original structure.

The tour took about 3 hours all told, then we piled back into the van for the trip back. En route we stopped at a restaurant, where we’d stopped on the inbound leg to preorder lunch. My plate of barbecued chicken, rice, and beans was simple but delicious. As with the inbound leg, we stopped at the border to walk through the customs checkpoint, which entailed having our passports checked and stamped. Since we’re both used to clearing customs and immigration at airports, this was a mildly novel experience but nothing too exciting. Once we got back to the hotel, we enjoyed a pleasant evening at the pool and a tasty dinner.

Saturday morning we got up, packed, and caught the shuttle we had booked back to Belize City. Our driver, Lucy, was a great conversationalist and told us all about life in Belize (summary: go to Guatemala if you need surgery; don’t trust politicians; if you want to live in Belize, rent before buying). Our destination was the water taxi terminal at the southern end of the city, where we wanted to take a water taxi to Caye Caulker. Tickets were around $20 each, and after a short wait we boarded the water taxi for the ride.

(Intermission: let’s talk about dollars. Belize uses the Belizean dollar (BZD), which is pegged at a 2:1 exchange rate with US dollars. Some places show prices in USD, but most are in BZD. We found that USD was accepted everywhere, and most places would accept USD and return change in USD. Lots of places don’t take cards, and none of the places we went to throughout the whole trip would accept American Express.)

The water taxi ride took about 45 minutes and deposited us at the tiny terminal at Caye Caulker. Luggage handling is a bit of a mess– the ferry was too full for us to carry on our small luggage, so we checked it; after arrival we had to wait for 45min or so for the luggage to be unloaded and sorted out. This was made less pleasant by the stink of rotting seaweed. At the moment, Caye Caulker’s eastern shore has been collecting an unusual amount of seaweed, which mostly sits there in the sun and decomposes. Crews come and shovel it away every so often, but not fast enough… thus the smell.

Apparently every vacation spot in the Caribbean is legally required to have a decorative sign

Caye Caulker is not a large island– it’s long and narrow, so you can easily walk from the western side to the eastern in five minutes or so. We’d booked at the Colinda Cabanas, and I can’t say enough good about the property– easy to get to, quiet, clean, with a small but very pleasant waterfront and beach area. Our bungalow was set towards the back of the property, with a small front porch with a water view. It was small but neat on the inside. Like Ka’ana, they provide filtered bottled water, which is important– I did get a touch of Belize belly at one point, probably due to ice cubes, and it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

I loved the Belizean hardwood ceiling and trim

One of the reasons we wanted to visit Caye Caulker was its laid-back vibe. San Pedro is larger and more like a mini-Cancun, but Caulker is super slow-moving. In fact, “Go Slow” is their official island motto, and people take it seriously. There are no cars on the island, which is fine because you wouldn’t need them anyway. Instead, there are golf-cart taxis, plus lots of bikes. Colinda included two bikes with our cabin, but we didn’t use them because it was easy enough to walk. There are plenty of restaurants and bars, and a few shops. Interestingly, most of the grocery trade in Belize is controlled by Taiwanese immigrants, so you’ll see lots of grocery stores with Chinese surnames or poorly translated English phrases.

At the north end of the island, there’s an area known as “The Split”; in 1961, when Hurricane Hattie blew through, the storm surge washed away part of the island, leaving a ~100′ wide channel. We mostly stayed on the south part of the island. The Lazy Lizard is a famous bar right at the Split, and we walked past it a few times, but it looked like the kind of loud, heavy-drinking stupidity that we generally avoid. We did take a ferry across to the north side one afternoon to hang out at a secluded beach; the hotel on site is closed but they’ll still sell you beach access for BZ$10, which was well worth it.

Caulker has a reputation as a cheap destination for backpackers, and there were plenty of ’em. However, overall the island wasn’t nearly as busy as I expected. It is more busy during the summer. One note: lobsters aren’t in season until June so we didn’t get to have any. #firstworldproblems

We’d scheduled two activities while in Caye Caulker. First was overflying the Blue Hole. This is a legendary scuba destination, but since we don’t dive, a flight was the next best thing. There are two primary tour operators who provide flights from the small Caye Caulker airstrip: Tropic Air and Maya Air. Both operate air service to the mainland and other islands with Cessna Caravans, but only Tropic has Caravan flights over the Blue Hole.

A TropicAir Caravan on its way

The TropicAir website is absolutely awful, so save yourself some hassle and call them if you want to book a flight. The flight takes about an hour overall. Tropic Air has a very nice new terminal building at the airport; after a brief wait, the C208 landed and we joined the passengers who had already flown from San Pedro to pick us up then departed for the tour. The flight out was at 3500′, then we descended to 1000′ over the Blue Hole, and went as low as 700′ to see the shipwreck. Whether or not you enjoy flying in small airplanes, the scenery is absolutely stunning; watching the pilot and silently judging his airmanship was just an added bonus for me.

aerial view of the Blue Hole

note sadness on my face because I am not the one flying the plane

most shipwrecks are underwater… not here

Because we are who we are, of course we had some unscheduled activities while at Caulker, too, including taking one of the Colinda kayaks out for a paddle. The wind was steady the whole time we were there: out of the east at 15 to 20 knots. This made kayaking a little more difficult than it would have been if we’d gone to the west side, but being able to take a few steps from our cabana and be in the kayak made up for that.

we should be keeping a list of “places we have been kayaing”

Our other big adventure was snorkeling. Caye Caulker sits about a 5-minute boat ride away from the edge of a large reef system and marine preserve, so we were eager to get out in it and snorkel. Caveman is the best-rated tour operator on the island but they wouldn’t return Erica’s emails, so we booked with Anwar Tours and had a superb experience. Our guide, Jian, was born on the island and has lived there his entire life, so he was a wealth of information and guidance about the area. At the first stop, we fed rays and nurse sharks; the other two were actually inside the reef boundaries, so we got to see a gorgeous selection of marine life, including the biggest, ugliest moray eel I’ve ever seen.

A few other Culker highlights:

• The coffee at Ice and Beans is terrific. We made it a regular morning stop.
• There’s a local food called “fryjacks”. Think of it like a super-sized empanada– a fry-bread shell stuffed with goodies. Errolyn’s was our favorite fryjack place, but we had good ones at Ka’ana and at a couple of other places.
• The local animal shelter lets their charges run around the island during the day. You will often find friendly dogs, and occasionally cats, just walking around spreading joy.
• One morning we did a yoga class at Namaste. It was jam-packed, but it was a good class.
• Every day at sunset, the staff at the Iguana Reef Hotel feeds the stingrays, which means you can get as close to them as you want.

If you can’t find a dog to pet, a stingray will do

Although I would happily have stayed longer, eventually we had to go back home. Sad, right? On a whim, I decided to book us on Maya Air for the 8-minute flight back to the Belize City airport. The small price premium (compared to buying water taxi tickets plus a taxi from the ferry to the airport) was far outweighed by the time savings, and buying the ticket could not have been easier– show up at the Maya Air counter, tell them your name, hand them a credit card, and walk away 5 minutes later. It was faster to buy these tickets in person than it usually is to buy tickets from the websites that American or Delta offer.

Our view on departure– Colinda is the third dock from the bottom

Anyway: as advertised, the flight was about 8 minutes long, then we were on the ramp at BZE. Customs and immigration was again straightforward, and after a short wait we were back on another 737-800 headed home.

Overall, Belize was an amazing place to visit and I’m eager to go back.