Monday, June 30, 2008

O-town

No... not the short lived boy band from days of yore... My slang for Orlando. I am a native Floridian so I am allowed to call it that. I ended up with a reserve trip that had a decent layover in the land of Disney.

It was actually a trip out of the MIA/FLL domicile, so I had to deadhead into Fort. Lauderdale to start the trip. I was a little miffed because I put myself on the standby list for a seat in First, and when you are traveling on company business you are supposed to get priority over Non-Rev passengers, but in the end, the agents put a Non-Rev in the last seat in First. I did get to sit in an aisle seat but I was next to these two 16 year old kids.

This was strange.... they were a couple and their parents were letting them vacation together in Puerto Rico together. What kind of parents would do that? They were all over each other the whole flight. I was thinking they should have fashioned a cover out of the the blankets for a little privacy. People want to join the Mile High Club anyway they can I guess. I think with a little more privacy, they would have.

I ended up meeting up with my friend Janet when I got to Orlando. We used to work together at The Disney Store when she lived back in Texas. She and her husband moved to Florida a couple of years ago. She drove in and we had lunch together at Bennigan's. It was fun to sit and catch up about the "old days".


This reserve month is wrapping up. It wasn't too exciting, hence the shortage of posts. I have to serve another reserve rotation next month, but I will start flying International on July 2, so hopefully I will get some more exotic locales.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Taking Christian Home (part of the way)

I just returned from an Airline Ambassadors trip. I took a little boy named Christian DeCenas from St. Louis to Miami. Originally I was to take him to Miami and bring two little girls (Kelin and Raquel - read about them in prior blog entries) along, and take them home to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Sadly, a TACA airliner crashed in TGU and the airport was permanently closed, so their trip has been delayed. But I was still needed to take Christian to Miami. From there, an Eagle F/A named Derek would take him to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.


I flew up to STL the night before and then met Christian and his wonderful host family at the airport at 4:45am (nice and early). Our flight to Miami was fine. The crew was great and real helpful. We got to Miami a bit early and I handed him over to Derek and as luck would have it, got on a flight bound for home that was delayed from earlier so I did not even have to sit around Miami and wait at all.
I am a bit sad that I won't be able to take Kelin and Raqeul home. They will be going now into San Pedro Sula at the end of the month, but their travel dates conflict with some international training I have scheduled. The good news is Kelin's scoliosis has been corrected and Raquel has had some preliminary work on her bilateral hip dislocation so both girls are on the mend.

Westward to Alaska

I am a bit delayed in posting the pictures from my Alaska trip. I picked it up last week. We flew out on Memorial Day. The flight was full with the usual cruise ship crowd. And of course we sold out of food before we were even half way thru the cabin, but once we landed in beautiful Anchorage, it did not matter.

The high temperature while I was there was 65 degrees. A nice change from the oppressive heat of home. I hung out on the layover with Susan, one of my co-workers. We started at 7am on Tuesday (mind you ANC is three hours behind home so it isn't THAT early) and went to this place called the White Spot for breakfast. It was very local (but I will say the name sounds kind of racist) but the food was great. I had HUGE pancakes and some reindeer sausage.

We then headed down to Pete's to rent our bikes. He takes care of all the flight crews. We ran into Bonnie, another co-worker, when we got there.


Susan and I decided to do the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail (http://www.trailsofanchorage.com/kincaid_park.htm). It is about 8 miles one way, so the round trip is 16 miles. It hugs the coast out past the airport, then goes up a rather steep mountain. We ended up walking our bikes up the mountain, but riding down was fun. We saw a mother moose and her babies, but we were mindful to keep our distance. At one point you are at the end of the runway and it looks like the planes are going to land right on top of you.


We detoured on the way back to the Sugaya Asian Grocery Store. We had lunch there and got some snacks for the red-eye home. We also ran into Bonnie again. Susan and I were exhausted....



We got back to the hotel around 3pm. I was tired and my nads were sore from the bike ride and I just wanted to sleep for a few hours, but the hotel is getting renovations so the constant jack hammering made it hard to sleep. I think they stopped around 5pm so I might have got an hours worth of sleep.

The flight home had about 40 open seats in the back which was nice. We had the last row to ourselves. There was this one gentleman we had to cut off because he was being rather liberal with the "toddies".