Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

2008; another year has elapsed. It was a fairly eventful one. We bought a house and we sold a house. We went to Iceland twice, and the UAE and Oman once. Sarah also spent time in the US over the summer. It wasn't quite the three months on the road that we'd aimed for, but it wasn't bad, either. All of our trips were highly enjoyable.

This year will see the birth of our second child, the consequences of which should make the rest of the year as eventful as we could possibly want it to be... and beyond.

Once that happens, we'll be temporarily immobilised, of course, so we're starting this year as we did the last one, namely with an immediate trip.

Taking advantage of our current geographical location (east coast of the US), we'll be flying down to Mexico tomorrow, to Cancún on the Yucatán peninsula. We'll spend just a single night in Cancún before moving on.

It'll be a short trip, just ten days, as we don't want Eloïse to miss too much peuterspeelzaal. We'll drive around, hang out at the beach, visit Mayan ruins and, of course, eat lots of good Mexican food.

With a bit of luck, there will be cheap WiFi access somewhere and I'll be able to post some details of our travels.

In the meantime, our Christmas photos are now on-line.

I'm writing this on a seriously wavering wireless connection from our hotel room in Mérida, the capital of the Yucatán state. I had to manually configure the connection, as the DHCP server here appears to be dead.

We arrived in Mérida yesterday afternoon, following a 325 km drive from Cancún along the annoyingly straight 180D motorway. Where's cruise control when you need it?

Cancún proved to be as tacky as the vast majority of accounts portray it. The Zona Hotelera resort area truly is a blot on the landscape, consisting largely of an endless array of awful American chain eateries, including everything from Starbucks to Hooters. Seriously, if you wanted to visit a place that horrid from the US, you wouldn't need to leave the country. Just go to Florida.

On the other hand, if you skipped Cancún, you'd miss out on the one redeeming feature of our stay: dinner at La Parrilla on Av. Yaxchilán. That place was out of this world: nice surroundings, friendly waiters, good music and excellent overall value for money. In short, it was one of the best Mexican meals I've ever eaten.

In fact, the centre of Cancún didn't actually look all that bad. Just avoid the Zona Hotelera like the plague.

Even our hotel there was a disaster. The Gran Meliã Cancún was painfully slow to check into and ultimately provided us with a room that turned out to be occupied by other guests. We could have taken their valuables and done a runner.

It eventually took ninety minutes, four different rooms and some seriously harsh words with the staff before we were finally given the type of room we had reserved several days in advance. I suggested to the reception manager that he throw in free breakfast the next day to compensate for the inconvenience, a proposal that he, to his credit, accepted.

We couldn't leave Cancún quickly enough the next day. The weather had been cool and rainy, and the beaches had disappeared into the huge swell of the ocean, so neither walking along the beach or frolicking in the water had been an option. Hundreds of bored-looking tourists aimlessly ambled around the resorts, trying to dream up something to do.

Anyway, after filling up with petrol (a wise move, as it turned out there were no petrol stations for 100 km along 180D), we drove west, crossing the state border from Quintana Roo to Yucatán.

Mérida is a breath of fresh air, or would be if it weren't for the stifling fumes churned out by the buses and cars that line the city's narrow streets.

Nevertheless, it's a charming, bustling city that has not succumbed to the pressures of tourism that have turned its easterly neighbour into a grotesque neon nightmare.

Mérida's streets positively hum and vibrate with activity. The narrow pavements scarcely allow you to walk two abreast here, and buses hurtle along the kerb just centimetres from your elbow and hip. Small wonder that you see very few prams and buggies here, but it hasn't stopped us pushing ours along the potholed pavements. You get used to it after a while.

We visited one of the city's busy markets today. With Eloïse in the buggy, we settled down for some lunch at one of the many stalls lining the street. I had my first taste of panuchos, a Yucatecan speciality. It's a puffed-up tortilla with beans and meat. I had pork in mine, sprinkled with lime juice. Yeah!

Sarah's vegetarianism has proved a challenge at times. This is primarily because neither of us speaks decent Spanish. Plenty of people speak English here, but that still leaves plenty who don't. And why should they? We're in Mexico, after all. Ordinarily, I can just about get by in Spanish when ordering food, but there are so many things on the menu here that I've just never heard of. Many of the Mexican dishes are actually Yucatecan or Mayan specialities and it's very hard to figure out what's in them. It's not all huevos rancheros, you know.

Street peddlers abound here, although they're not quite as pushy as in some other countries. Just be firm and say no. It's harder when someone suddenly appears from nowhere and acts as an impromptu tour guide during your visit to the cathedral. Only when you get outside does he make his real aim clear and try to cajole you into accompanying him to his handicraft or souvenir shop. The friendliness turns a little frostier when you politely decline.

The people here are great, though; very friendly and always willing to oblige. They've been warm and welcoming, especially with Eloïse , who always makes a splash in hot countries with her red hair and pale skin. One woman in the market today informed us that our little girl's legs look as if they're made of queso!

Tomorrow, we head out of town for Uxmal, the site of an ancient ruined Mayan city. We're short on time, though, so we'll double back and head on to Chichén Itzá to spend the night. It's going to be another big driving day, but probably also our last. After this, it should be relatively short hops.

Open WiFi access is uncommon here. The few networks -- including encrypted ones -- I have managed to get onto have turned out to block SIP, so there has been no opportunity to call the home front cheaply from my mobile phone. My guess is that the upstream telco blocks this in an attempt to safeguard their revenue, although Skype seems to be popular here and offered by every corner Internet café. Perhaps there's a less cynical explanation, but I'm not about to pay KPN's international tariff.

Only one major purchase so far: a hammock. Sarah wants to hook it up outside in our soon-to-be-laid garden. Let's hope the coming summer is a good one.

After breakfast and allowing Eloïse a few minutes of playing on Plaza Grande, we left Mérida and headed for Uxmal.

Uxmal is about an hour's drive south-west of Mérida. It's an impressive site with many large buildings in amazingly good condition, considering their age.

As with most sites in Yucatán, climbing the pyramid's steps is not allowed, so one has to admire these great feats of engineering from ground level. I'm sure that's better for their preservation, anyway.

It was a sweltering day, the temperature somewhere in the mid-thirties. Iguanas basked in the sun all around the ruins, some of them at the side of the trails, others clinging to the rocks of the buildings. Eloïse found them fascinating.

After a surprisingly decent lunch at the site's sole restaurant, we drove back towards Mérida and joined road 180 heading eastward. Road 180 is the old Cancún to Mérida road that has been superseded in some respects by the 180D motorway, its toll-charged cousin. 180D is an expensive road (about 300 Pesos to travel its entire length) and we had already driven the full distance from Cancún to Merida a few days earlier, so we were curious to see how bad the old road was.

It actually turned out to be a decent, one lane road. It was a Saturday, so there wasn't much heavy goods traffic to hold us up and the scenery was considerably more interesting than along the almost unerringly straight toll road. That's because the old road passes straight through all of the towns en route, instead of skirting around them. This provided many a pleasing scene of people and their dogs; eating, chatting, sleeping or just watching our car go by.

We eventually reached Piste, the last town before the historic site of Chichén Itzá, just before sunset. We continued the extra few kilometres to our hotel and settled in for the night. It was a fairly long drive today, about 280 km in total.

Eloïse had us up and about around 07:00 this morning. We took advantage of the early hour to enjoy a leisurely breakfast, after which we fetched the buggy and walked the fifteen or so minutes to Chichén Itzá. We must have purchased tickets and been on the grounds around 08:15.

This is the time to come, as you beat the madd(en)ing crowds and pretty much have the place to yourself, save for a few other disciplined early birds.

The main pyramid is now closed to the public for climbing, as a careless tourist slipped and fell a couple of years ago. As is so often the case with such things, the powers that be subsequently legislated on behalf of the statistically insignificant minority, at the expense of the surefooted majority.

Whatever happened to the concept of 'at your own risk'? I'm not claiming that ascending the steps is safe. Indeed, they are steep, shallow and uneven, and a fall from near the top would almost certainly kill or cripple you, but I still say one should be able to make up one's own mind about such things.

Anyway, I took solace in the assumption that the pyramid will doubtless last longer if trodden by fewer feet, so in that sense it's surprising that tourists were recently allowed to climb it at all.

Today was another sweltering day, perhaps the hottest so far. It took several hours to make our way around all of the sights, by which time the site had become besieged by busloads of tourists. It's a big place, though, so I didn't find that the experience was marred. The only time it's irritating to have so many people there is when a large tour group stands in front of and obscures a building of interest to listen to their tour guide. This makes taking a photo a tedious affair, as you wait for the crowd to disperse.

Lunch at the site was a decidedly mediocre affair. This is to be expected at such places where one restaurant has exclusive catering rights, but we had Eloïse in tow, so our options were limited. We therefore took a calculated risk and paid the price.

The cheese on the nachos I ordered turned out not to be real cheese at all, but a ghastly emulsified substance I grew up in England calling processed cheese. In the US, they euphemistically call it American cheese. Basically, it's the plasticine-like stuff they put on hamburgers in places like McDonalds.

After leaving most of my lunch on the plate (the juice drinks were tasty, though), we went back inside to see the remaining buildings. We then left and went back to the hotel to relax for a while.

Later, we drove into the nearby town of Piste and had dinner at a local restaurant before driving back to Chichén Itzá for the evening light show. For forty-five minutes, lights are shone onto and across the buildings, while a Spanish-speaking narrator dramatically brings the place to life.

Some may find such an obviously artificial event cheesy, but I enjoyed myself, even though I couldn't glean much from the soundtrack.

Given my abysmal understanding of Spanish, it was hard not to be distracted by the unearthly clear sky, whose stars burned so brightly that I found myself yearning for a better understanding of all that I was beholding. This would clearly be a great place to practise astronomy and it's not hard to imagine why the night sky played such a dominant role in Mayan society.

I think I saw a satellite, which I had first mistaken for a star, but it was moving across the firmament; too slowly to be an aeroplane and too slow to be much else.

Another crack-of-dawn start to the day, thanks to the combination of Eloïse and the growing practice of going to bed monastically early.

After breakfast and checking out, we drove to Cobá, another Mayan ruin site. Our visit here was curtailed before it had even really begun by a sudden downpour, which showed no sign of relenting.

We surrendered to our predicament and drove back along the road about half a kilometre to get some lunch, stopping on the way to admire a crocodile that was eyeing us from the swamp at the side of the road. Not a sight you see every day in Amsterdam.

During lunch, the weather took a turn for the better and we were able to return to Cobá, parking and reentering the site on the tickets we had purchased that morning.

It's possible to rent bikes or even take a bicycle taxi inside, but Eloïse needed a doze, so we pushed the buggy from each building to the next. There's nothing like a good jostle in the buggy to lull her to sleep.

Eloïse was fast asleep by the time we reached the main pyramid, which bears the distinction of having maintainers who continue to allow tourists to ascend its steps.

Sarah and I decided to climb it separately, so that the one of us on the ground could keep an eye on our sleeping cherub. We decided that I would go first and Sarah demonstrated her great unsentimental practicality by asking me to hand over the car keys before going up.

It goes without saying that it was another searingly hot day, so I was pretty tired by the time I made it to the top of the hundred-odd steps. The view from above across the canopy of trees was definitely worth the exuded sweat, however. It took me a few minutes to regain my composure for the descent.

Years of living in Amsterdam and dealing with the steep, narrow staircases of canal houses had primed me for the descent of the pyramid, and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself able to descend as on a normal set of stairs. While most of those around me were coming down sat on their arse with their hands behind them like a crab, or by consistently stepping down with the same foot and catching up with the other, the size of my stride and my experience with old stairwells combined to make mine a faster and easier descent.

When I arrived back down at the base, it was Sarah's turn to go up. I took photos and kept a watchful eye on Eloïse .

Back on terra firma, we visited the remaining buildings and then returned to the car for the drive to Tulum.

Just before sunset, we arrived in Tulum and drove along the seafront to get to our hotel, which was actually a bungalow on the beach.

As I type this, I'm looking through the window at the fine white sands and listening to the breakers coming crashing in on the shore. Our patio area at the front of the bungalow even has a hammock, along with a table and chairs. The interior of the bungalow has soft lighting and candles dotted around the place.

Needless to say, Eloïse hastened to make merry in the sand. She says she was building a snowman, but it doesn't look much like one to me. That he's much broader than tall is by design, she says. One thing's for sure: our girl is enjoying herself here.

We were playing on the beach with Eloïse by 07:30 this morning. There's really no stopping her. She continued to build her snowman with scant regard for parental grumblings about non-entities such as breaking our fast.

When we did finally convince her to allow us all to eat, we drove into Tulum for a filling meal at the very pleasant Don Cafeto. Its terrace made an agreeable spot for watching life go by in Tulum, whilst sipping coffee and juice, and tucking into chilaquiles, eggs and toast.

With the family bellies taken care of, we decided to occupy today with a jaunt to Playa del Carmen, which took about an hour to drive northwards to.

Playa del Carmen was obviously once a very pleasant town in an idyllic setting. Today, the setting is equally idyllic along the tackily named Riviera Maya, but the town is straining to retain its identity under the unrelenting onslaught of mass tourism and the all-engulfing tide of naff and lurid excess that has followed. What a shame that tourism and tawdriness so often go hand in hand.

Need I mention that the day was yet another scorcher?

I found myself spending most of the day trying to imagine how this town might have looked a quarter of a century (or longer) ago. Its beaches are still stunning, but a different kind of sun-worshipper comes here today. Watching them vie for a spot on the beach reminded me of the Pier 39 sea-lions in San Francisco, who attempt to leap from the water onto an already very overcrowded pier, only to be flicked back into the water by the flipper of a strategically perched kin member.

We quickly left the sizzling human meat on the grill and continued our walk down the unimaginatively named Quinta Avenida (Fifth Avenue), where faceless souvenir shops offered passers-by T-shirts bearing inane slogans, most of which with beer-drinking, sex or both as their theme. One can't help but wonder what kind of individual considers it a proud and noteworthy achievement to be able to consume beer.

'Bad girls suck. Good girls swallow.'

'FBI: Female Body Inspector.'

'I'm shy, but I've got a big dick.'

'I've used all of my sick days, so now I'm calling in drunk.'

'This isn't a beer belly, it's the fuel tank of a sex machine.'

And one for the Simpsons' children to buy for Homer: 'Who are these kids and why are they calling me dad?' Good grief.

Hair beads, cheap sunglasses, shoddy rucksacks, footballs, overpriced beachwear, bracelets, trinkets, canned drinks, etc. Every sunny tourist destination in the whole world is filled with the same kind of shop offering the same kind of rubbish. Only the currency varies.

The south end of Quinta Avenida is definitely the worst, with the highest concentration of American fast-food eateries. There's a Starbucks, a Johnny Rockets (that's a bad burger joint, not a place for purchasing incendiary attachments for condoms, in case you were wondering), Papa John's (pizza), Subway, Häagen-Dazs and others. One of the golden rules of responsible travel is: Support local businesses with your money, not the multinationals.

In spite of the blight of American chains, we did, in fact, eat a great lunch in Playa del Carmen from the local 100% Natural, which also serves absolutely delicious fruit juice smoothies. Check out the local speciality: hibiscus juice. I had mine mixed with lime juice.

After Eloïse 's snooze and an iced coffee, we drove back to Tulum for our second night at the beach bungalow. Eloïse played in the sand as the sun went down.

Tomorrow's our last full day in Mexico, I'm sad to say. The day after will see us return to Cancún for the flight back to Providence, this time via Charlotte, North Carolina.

The day began early today at 06:55. The sky is overcast and it's raining lightly. The emerald waves are rolling in on the beach, where Eloïse 's wide, flat snowman has survived another night of being battered by the oceanic winds.

In the last few days, our girl has started to talk more and more of home. She mentions some of her cuddly toys and refers to her look-house, her name for our house, so-called because that's how we would refer to it when we went to look at it during our prolonged period of purchasing ponderance.

Today, she made her thoughts about home very clear, when she said, "I'm looking forward to looking at my baby", referring to the baby doll that Auntie Fenella sent her a couple of months ago.

Given the frequency of such statements, it's undeniable that our little one is becoming more attached to places and objects. By the time we make it back to Amsterdam, we'll have been away for three weeks, which isn't long by our standards, but it's long enough for this trip. Eloïse is ready to go back to her life on the other side of the ocean. I imagine that she'll become even more attached to home over the coming years.

We were on the beach by 07:30 again, rebuilding Eloïse 's snowman, paddling in the water and beachcombing. A white crab scurried sideways over the sand, perfectly camouflaged against the background. Overhead, pelicans made their way toward some unknown destination. It's always a pleasure to see these birds, as such sightings are a rare occurrence for me.

After another desayuno Azteca at Don Cafeto, we drove a couple of kilometres north to the site of the Tulum ruins.

Of the Mayan sites we've visited -- Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Cobá and Tulum -- Tulum was definitely the least impressive. Ironically, it was also by far the most commercialised, with everything from upside-down Mexicans spinning on unwinding ropes around a maypole, a man with a gigantic iguana charging tourists for posing for photos next to his lizard, a string of market stalls selling naff tourist tat, a branch of Subway, stands selling tickets to theme parks and other cheap or not so cheap thrills, etc. Parking was also more expensive than at any of the other sites.

We made our way around the ruins, none of which awed us, but the boards along the route explained the history and purpose of each building very well, as well as the significance of the site in general. It seems that Tulum survived as a Mayan city, long after the other nearby civilisations had fallen.

The Tulum ruins are perched right on the coast and the green sea provides a scenic backdrop to these dramatic buildings. Iguanas cling to the rocks of the cliff face, high above the pristine beaches and rocks.

It was quite a bit cooler today than over the last few days, for which we were thankful. A sudden downpour provided brief respite from the humidity, but such relief really is short-lived in this climate, as the water soon evaporates back into the atmosphere.

Once we'd seen the ruins, we drove back into Tulum for lunch at a place called Charlie's, which turned out to serve, amongst other things, delicious juices. We've done very well on the juice front this trip. We downed several of them and I picked up my e-mail via my phone.

Speaking of which, I must say that my Nokia E90 has proven its worth in the couple of months I've had it. In that time, it's travelled from the Netherlands to Belgium, Germany, Iceland, the US and Mexico and performed very well at all times. Having a functional, fast Web browser and decent e-mail client at hand is very convenient, especially when combined with the generosity of an open WLAN for free access to the Net.

Speaking of which, I still haven't found a single location with Internet access that allows SIP. VoIP from here seems to be nigh on impossible, unless you use Skype or similar. Port 25 is blocked, too, which makes relaying e-mail through our mail server back home a non-starter.

So, all we've used the Internet for in Mexico is to read our e-mail and send SMS messages to the home front via a Web to SMS gateway. Net access has rarely been available from our lodgings and, when we're elsewhere, blogging from my phone is just too painful. Yes, the E90's UI and full qwerty keyboard are good, but it's still only a phone. Besides, when we're not at our lodgings, we've got better things to be doing than trying to get on-line.

Anyway, after our late lunch, we came back to the beach bungalow and Eloïse and I played in the sand on the beach, whilst Sarah lay in the hammock and relaxed. She's been very tired today. We skipped dinner, except for a couple of limeades and dessert, as lunch had been eaten so late and been so filling.

And that pretty much rounds off this trip. Tomorrow, we have to make a fairly early start for the drive back to Cancún, where we'll return our hire car and begin the long haul northwards back to Providence. We should arrive around 22:00.

It's been a relaxing and inspirational first trip to Mexico (my two previous jaunts across the Californian border to Tijuana really don't count). It's a huge country and one couldn't realistically hope to gain much more than a few impressions from an eight day encounter in a relatively small geographic area. I hope we'll come back and I can say that the last week has certainly left us wanting more.

With just a couple of extra days in Providence slotted in before returning to Amsterdam, I must say I'm looking forward to getting back to our own home, although I daresay the weather will come as a shock to the system. And, as eager as I am to be back in our own domain, this trip has certainly reawakened my appetite for travel and I can't wait to start planning our next trip, which should hopefully be at school half-term at the end of February.

...than the bullshit begins.

In fact, it had begun before we even touched down in Charlotte. Our flight from Cancún was carrying no I-94W forms on board, one of which I need to fill in before I can re-enter the US. This is the first international flight to the US that I've ever been on that didn't carry a pile of such forms.

With only a 70 minute layover in Charlotte, I did not need to be wasting time filling in my forms on arrival, when I could have done so on the plane. US immigration is notoriously slow and must be undergone (yes, undergone is the right word here) at one's point of entry, not one's final destination.

Well, Charlotte turned out to have the slowest immigration processing of any American airport I've ever entered the country through. I timed the queues: they were processing individuals at the rate of slower than one person every five minutes. Simple arithmetic demonstrated that, with the number of other poor unfortunates in front of us, it was going to be very tight getting onto our next flight.

We finally got through immigration after being sent to another queue, where a couple of gracious passengers allowed us to go ahead of them when they overheard us talking about missing our connection. There were twenty minutes to go until our flight left. Sounds like plenty, right? Wrong.

You see, they have this other great system here, whereby you also need to reclaim your baggage from the conveyor belt at your point of entry. Once you've done that, you carry it about 200 m to another conveyor belt, upon which you place it back into the system. Busy work for psychiatric patients, I call it. How did anyone dream this up? Why can't this be automated?

But it gets better, of course. Because you've now had access to your checked-in bags, you're now tainted. This means that you now have to go back through security (because you could have taken something out of your checked-in luggage that is not allowed in the cabin on your next flight), which in our case means not just removing laptops from bags, emptying fluid from bottles, removing belts, shoes and whatnot, but also having the car-seat examined, the buggy inspected, and last but not least, Sarah subjected to another body check on account of her refusal to walk through the x-ray machine as a pregnant woman. Of course, all of this had already been done once earlier that day in Cancún.

As if that's not bad enough, before we could even go through security, we had to queue for the pleasure. The queue for our concourse (C) was too long -- we didn't stand a chance -- so we had to scurry down to concourse B, go through security there, then scurry back to C.

It never rains, but it pours, so our gate, C19, was the very last one at the back of the terminal. We hurried as fast as we could with our car-seat, buggy, camera, laptop and other hand-baggage -- not to forget Eloïse , who was a trooper and sat cooperatively in her car-seat the entire time as we raced it down the concourse -- down to gate C19, where we just managed to make it onto the plane as the door was closed behind us.

Even then, the fun wasn't over. We were located in the row behind the emergency exit row and a child's seat is not allowed there, so after sitting down and fastening first the car-seat and then Eloïse into it, we had to be moved. The same thing had happened on the outbound flight to Cancún.

Next, the stewardess complained when Sarah asked her to fill up a water bottle instead of accepting just a cupful. Sarah explained she was pregnant, but the stewardess informed her that there were other passengers and only "so much water on board". Ridiculous.

The icing on the cake had been saved for last, however, Upon arrival in Providence, we discovered that our checked-in bag had not made it onto our flight. We had to hang around to file a lost luggage (sorry, luggage irregularity) report with a woman who was as friendly as she was dimwitted, a familiar combination here.

With that out of the way, we finally got to come back to Sarah's folks' house and relax.

The next day consisted of multiple frustrating phone calls to US Airways' lost luggage centre, trying to ascertain the whereabouts of our bag and why it had not simply been put on the next flight to Providence after ours.

As you might expect, each such phone call provided bizarre new information that contradicted at least one statement made during a previous call. After a while, you seriously start to wonder whether someone might just be fucking with you, but at times like that, I remember the old adage and truism about not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. This was never more apt than in the case of US Airways' staff.

Tempering hopefulness with realism, I went to a shopping mall and bought some fresh underwear. I'm buggered if I'm going to stew on my own skid marks whilst waiting for US Airways to pull their bloody finger out.

The bag was finally delivered to the house this morning, which was a great relief, because we fly out of Boston again Sunday afternoon. If it had been delivered 36 hours later, we would no longer have been here to receive it and it would have had to be sent on to Amsterdam. Thankfully, that little logistical exercise has been spared us.

And there you have it: the imperfect end to a perfect trip. Never underestimate the power of glacially slow US immigration, improbably dim-witted airline staff and Monty Pythonesque inefficient airport procedures to throw a spanner in the works of your travel plans.

And so, as I mentioned, we will fly from Boston to Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon, arriving back home early Monday morning. That will be our sixth flight in just over three weeks, but also our last for the time being, as Sarah's pregnancy is about to enter the final third of its duration.

It's been a good trip. Christmas was fun, New Year was very low-key and Mexico was the definite highpoint. Right now, I'm just looking forward to getting back home and sleeping in my own bed.

Before we get on the plane to Amsterdam, I wanted to give a quick plug for The Edge in Providence.

The Edge serves delicious coffee (the best I've found along the east coast of the US, although I'm admittedly not well-travelled here), as well as tasty sandwiches, wraps and cup cakes. On top of that, they have magazines, free wireless Net access and a few toys for children; and all of that in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere.

In short, if you find yourself in Providence and like excellent coffee, give The Edge a try. I particularly recommend the traditional cappuccino and the Black Cat espresso melange from Intelligentsia.

After the decidedly troublesome trip back from Cancún to Providence, the final leg of our journey from Providence to Amsterdam couldn't have gone more smoothly.

We took the bus from Providence to Boston, arriving for check-in more than two hours ahead of our flight's scheduled departure time. With a strikingly short queue in front of the counters, the check-in formalities were soon completed and we made our way through the security checks.

After some refreshments, we boarded the plane and were delighted to find it only about 25% occupied. I suppose most people who travel for pleasure around this time of year do so over Christmas and New Year. Few people are going anywhere in the second week of January, except for business travellers. This is clearly the time to travel.

With so few passengers and so little luggage to get on board, our plane managed to leave the gate ten minutes early. A strong tailwind meant that our flying time was just 5h 57m, possibly the fastest crossing I've ever made.

Eloïse sat through Jungle Book 2 in its entirety and seemed enthralled by it. After watching a film, I laid down across the four seats at my disposal, made a nice pile of four pillows and went to sleep for a couple of hours. Sarah stayed next to Eloïse , when she really should have moved across the aisle and lain down. Consequently, she hardly slept at all, which was a great pity, as this was such an easy flight to stretch out on.

When we touched down in Amsterdam, we were a full hour ahead of schedule and arrived at a blissfully smoke-free Schiphol. At last!

It took just seconds to pass through passport control. As we emerged on the other side, our bags were the first ones to come out on the conveyor belt. All four bags came out in a row.

The green customs channel was unmanned, so we strolled through it, out of the building and straight to a taxi large enough to accommodate all of our bags and child items.

In spite of the Monday morning rush hour, we got to our front door just a few minutes after the time we had actually been scheduled to land. All in all, this was almost certainly the easiest, most relaxed flight we've ever taken. What a relief.

After turning on the floor heating and grabbing a few hours of sleep, we rushed to get Eloïse ready for peuterspeelzaal and then went to Bagels & Beans for lunch. Afterwards, I started working my way through the large pile of post and then went to the supermarket to buy in supplies.

It's good to be back. I feel as if we were gone for ages, when, in reality, it was really just a little more than three weeks. It must be my sympathetic nesting instinct coming to the fore.

There are only 11 weeks to go until the birth of our second child.

It may sound like an unbelievable exaggeration, but I'm feeling less well prepared for this one than I was for Eloïse .

When Sarah fell pregnant the first time, there was an endless stream of visits to the midwife, shopping trips, childbirth classes, reading and research. This time around, I have a better idea of what to expect, so there has been much less to do. For example, there have been no childbirth classes and only a couple of visits to the midwife. We just haven't felt the need this time. Furthermore, with an arsenal of baby items in house, we haven't needed to shop for much at all, so there have been few products to research, either. And with more knowledge and experience of babies, there has been less need for reading this time around.

With Eloïse taking up so much of our time, the circumstances are thus such that Sarah's second pregnancy isn't on our mind day and night. Although I haven't exactly forgotten about it, the 29 weeks to date have absolutely flown by. Sarah's starting to feel increasingly tired now, however, so we're becoming more constantly aware of the pregnancy than we have been.

When I sit back and contemplate just how soon the new baby will be here, I must say I find it a bit daunting. Although not much practical preparation has been required this time around, the consequence of not having done any is that these daily activities haven't been subtly and gradually adjusting my mind to the idea of a new family member.

So, it's suddenly hitting home quite hard: there's a new baby coming in 2.5 months!

We're not totally unprepared, however. We've bought a few items of clothing recently and I'm about to order a new ISOFIX car-seat.

We're probably going to invest in a new cargo bike (bakfiets), too, although we haven't yet decided which make and model. Bicycle or tricycle? Which colour? If a tricycle, do we get wheels that turn independently of the box? Decisions, decisions.

I bought a preprinted baby logbook yesterday, in which we can record all of the milestones along the path of our new child's development. I also eyed with envy the 2008 models of the Bugaboo Cameleon pram, but our almost three year old model has plenty of life left in it yet, so I can't justify a new one of those. Sarah doesn't even want to buy a new set of fabrics for it, so it looks as if we'll be sticking with orange over blue.

Names are something we're still wrestling with. We didn't start seriously looking at names until a couple of months ago. Much of the groundwork was, of course, done for Eloïse , so we didn't feel the need to start as early on.

Although I would emotionally be just as happy with a boy or a girl, I'm almost starting to lean towards preferring a girl. There are a few reasons for this:

1. I am familiar with being a parent to a girl. For example, one thing I know about girls is that their anatomy renders then incapable of squirting urine at me. Girls are therefore more practically engineered than boys (in this regard, at least).

2. Boys seem to be generally more trouble. If there's a stabbing at school, it usually involves two boys. Who causes all of the wars in the world? Mostly men. Boys need to prove themselves to survive amongst other boys, whereas girls don't; at least not in the same way. Girls can present serious problems too, but on the whole, I suspect they're statistically less likely to die tragically. Yes, I'm a pragmatist.

3. It's much easier to choose a name for a girl than for a boy. Why is that?

This article by Laura Wattenberg delves into the reasons behind 'boy block' and provides some compelling evidence for the phenomenon. Sarah and I are definitely sufferers, but I didn't know why until I'd read this article. I've been convinced.

Since we've chosen to follow nature and not discover the sex of our baby until the birth, we have double the workload when it comes to finding a suitable name. The task is further complicated by the fact that Sarah and I are from quite different cultural backgrounds. Even amongst names that are phonetically or stylistically similar, we find that we have quite different taste.

We're not even inclined towards choosing the same number of names. A first name and a middle name is pretty much the de facto standard in the US, whereas I do not feel bound by what I view as an artificial, self-imposed template.

Nor do I believe that the first name has to be the one that the child goes by. It's very common here for the child to be known by its second name or even some (often more colloquial) derivation of either the first or the second.

That means that I may want to put a name that Sarah really likes in second position, because the B-A order sounds more pleasing to the ear than the A-B order. To my mind, nothing is lost, because the child can still be known by name A. To Sarah, though, this is often unacceptable. A must precede B, because the first position is where the child's everyday name goes. I care more about the phonetics than the positioning. Sarah would rather solve this issue by choosing a different name altogether for the second slot.

Tricky, isn't it?

There are other issues I'm not going into, because they're mostly the result of our different culture and its accompanying popular heritage. For example, your average American has watched (or is at least aware of) a vastly greater number of films and television programmes than I have.

This means that certain names that, to me, have little or no association are unacceptably linked to a certain, often fictional personage in the US. Brand names, too, can turn out to have irretrievably tarnished names that are, to me, at least, still perfectly usable.

This phenomenon also works in reverse, from me to Sarah, but it's less pronounced. I'm more likely to think that a name sounds stuck-up or pretentious. At least we can both agree that Adolf has been sullied beyond patronage; I would also claim that George has suffered a similar fate.

I'm also revolted by the continuing American trend to bestow surnames on children, particularly boys. Often these names, like Hunter, Cooper, Parker, Carter and Porter are derived from old professions, to which, in my mind, they are still inextricably linked. It would be like calling your child programmer or system administrator. What a nice name!

Fortunately, Sarah's not drawn to these professional surnames-as-first-name, nor to the non-professional variety, either. Surnames are best left as surnames, in my opinion. You don't want your child's name to read like the engraved plate over the door of a firm of solicitors or accountants, do you? Well, apparently, many Americans want just that. What to me sounds ghastly and pretentious is very much in vogue over there.

We have a short list now, but as mentioned before, we're closer to a result with the girls' names than with the boys'. Be a girl and make life easy for us! We could probably name this child and a third without much difficulty now, as long as both were girls, of course.

Eloïse has been out of nappies and in underpants for some ten days now. In that time, she hasn't had a single accident of the urinal or faecal variety. I'm impressed.

She still wears a cloth nappy for going to bed, but that's the only time she has one on. I wonder whether she will regress or if this is really it for daytime nappies. Time will tell.

I took the car in for its first major service the week before last. The trip home after dropping off the car required a ride on the metro, followed by trams 12 and 2. I don't take public transport very often, preferring to either bike or walk whenever possible. The long walk to the metro station in the rain reminded me how lucky I am that everything I need on a daily basis is so close to home.

I almost missed the car's service window that day (due to oversleeping -- it was the day after returning from Providence), which I'd booked back in early December. If I had missed it, I'd have had to wait until the end of February for a new slot, which wouldn't have worked, because we're planning our next trip around the same time.

With Sarah getting ever closer to B-day, we'd prefer not to fly now; the airlines will soon disallow it, anyway. Instead, we're going to hit the road again for our first serious road trip since 2006.

With Eloïse in peuterspeelzaal and a birth on the horizon, we can't go away for two months as we did in the summer of 2006, so this trip will be just a couple of weeks long.

This time, we're heading to Scandinavia, specifically to Copenhagen and Stockholm. If there's time, we'll also spend a couple of days in Gothenburg.

Sweden will be a first for me, but I've been to Denmark before, solo when I was 16. I took the ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg, if I remember correctly, and then went south and stayed somewhere near a small town called Bevtoft; Toftlund, perhaps. I went there to meet someone I'd established contact with on sideband radio, which you might now view, I suppose, as an early form of recreational on-line chat. At the time, I ran a very popular sideband club from my bedroom.

Anyway, I can't remember where I went or what I did whilst in Denmark, except for a trip to a beach somewhere. I certainly didn't go anywhere near Copenhagen, so this will be an entirely different trip.

I think we'll head north-east from Hamburg and take the Puttgarden to Rødby ferry to cross over to Denmark.

The alternative is to drive north from Hamburg, through southern Denmark to Kolding and then over the Storebæltsbroen (Great Belt Bridge) at Nyborg.

The travel time is more or less the same for both routes, but taking the ferry cuts out about 130 km of driving and breaks up the journey somewhat, allowing us the chance to stretch our legs, eat a snack, etc. Both the Danish and the German offices of the ferry line say that there's no need to buy a ticket in advance for a particular crossing, so we'll purchase our ticket when we arrive at the port.

One way or another, it will take us about 8.5 hours to get from Amsterdam to Copenhagen. We could also break up the trip by spending a night in Hamburg, but since we're short on time, we've rejected that option and opted for a full day's driving.

After six nights in Copenhagen, we'll cross the Oresund Bridge to Malmö in Sweden and drive north-east to Stockholm. This will be another full day's driving, so it will be interesting to see how tolerant Eloïse proves. We'll stay a further six nights in Stockholm.

The hotels in Copenhagen and Stockholm are already booked, so now we just have to read up on daily activities for the two capitals.

If we can spare any more time, we'll try to squeeze in a couple of days in Gothenburg at the end, but it's a 1500 km drive back from Stockholm, so we'll lose a couple of days at least, just getting home.

Needless to say, as with all of our trips, I'm looking forward to this one, the last we'll take as a family of three.