trip report from the eighth World Wide Web conference in toronto, canada pre-conference activities

from new york to toronto by car:

on wednesday may 5, 1999, i flew from zürich to new york with swissair SR-102. in NY, i picked up a rental car and drove to larchmont, where i stayed with friends of our family. thursday was shopping day.

on friday, i had to pick up jakob lindenmeyer in the big apple. as on the days before, i used my notebook together with street atlas V6.0 and a GPS receiver to navigate. this combination of the latest state of the art hardware and software provides everything needed to find its way through a foreign town. it starts with a very detailed map that shows every road, continues with route planing with a lot of options such as defining vias and setting preferences such as avoiding toll roads and ends with spoken directions so that i could fully concentrate on the traffic while getting all the information i needed. and if i missed an exit, i always could stop and check the map to see how i could go back to the correct route. thanks to the GPS, i found the cafe where i was supposed to pick up jakob almost in time.
together, we started our journey towards toronto. again, the GPS helped us to find our way to highway 17 when jakob lost track of where we were. we followed state road 17 north, driving through the beautiful area of the catskill mountains. unfortunately, it was raining cats and dogs most of the time. just before dawn, we found a nice motel in endwell near binghamton.

to our surprise, the next morning greeted us with sunshine. after some shopping, we drove through endicott, home of IBM and then turned northward on highway 96. while we drove along cayuga lake, it started raining again. nevertheless, we stopped to see the very scenic taughannock water fall. as we drove on highway 89 to the shore of lake ontario, a heavy rainstorm made driving not too pleasant. but as we turned west to follow the lake, the rain stopped suddenly and we had nothing but blue sky. we enjoyed the view of the huge lake and finally found a motel near harrison grove, only about 30 minutes away from the niagara falls. on sunday may 9, we visited the world famous niagara falls. from the canadian side of the river, we enjoyed the view of the thundering fall. then we followed the lake shore until we reached toronto, the final destination of this trip. the city greeted us with blue sky and only a few clouds. on the way to toronto, we tried to find a restaurant with i nice view of lake ontario to have lunch, but because it was mothers day, every single chair was taken. but the nice grill bar of our hotel saved us from starving. on monday may 10 we got ready for the conference. when we went to register, there was hardly anybody in the huge convention center. in the afternoon, the computer room was up and running so that we could start working on our pile of emails. unlike in brisbane last year, they managed to setup a DHCP server this time, so there was no need to reconfigure the notebook each time we connect to a different cable.

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production note:

this trip report was written on a Vadem Clio C-1000 running Windows CE with Pocket Word. It was then transferred to a DELL Latitude notebook and modified as needed. this document is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.

this page conforms with the WAG

WWW8_post.html / 31-may-1999 (ra) / reto ambühler