Bad Start to a Long Trip

Well, I am currently sitting in the Anchorage airport awaiting my flight out to the Bering Strait. My journey began early yesterday morning in Baxter, Minnesota. Erin dropped me off for my 7:30 A.M. flight the first of what was supposed to be three for the day. Upon checking in for the flight I was informed that the flight was delayed due to a mechanical issue with the plane, and that it would be about an hour late. This of course was going to cause me to miss my connecting flight in Minneapolis. Now I try as often as I can to go online and select a seat for my flights. I had done so in this case and had a nice exit row seat for my flight from Minneapolis to Seattle. Now all of a sudden I am not going to make that flight and they are looking to book me on another flight. The agent finally tells me that she has found a seat for me on a direct flight from Minneapolis to Anchorage, but all she could get me was a middle seat in the back of the plane. As you an imagine I was not too excited about going from a nice roomy exit row to a middle seat in the back of the plane, but under the circumstances it was better than not making it to Anchorage at all. So the plane showed up about an hour late and we took off for Minneapolis. As we touched down I looked at my watch and realized that I might just be able to make my original connecting flight, the one with the exit row seat. So as soon as I got off the plane I took off running through the terminal. Of course my next flight was basically at the other end of the airport. As I came racing up to the counter to check in the agent told me to hurry they were about to close the door. I handed her my boarding pass I had printed off the night before and she tried to scan it. It wouldn’t scan. She told me just to run down to the plane and find an empty seat. So that’s what I did. I got on the plane to find my sweet exit row had been reassigned to someone else. 🙁 I was lucky though to find an isle seat near the front of the plane and thats where I sat.

As we took off I started thinking about what was going on and realized that I may have made a terrible mistake by getting on this plane. My bags were being checked on the direct flight to Anchorage, not on the flight I was on. Sometimes when a passenger doesn’t board a flight they will take their bags off thinking that the person is avoiding flying with their luggage for some reason. So now I’m thinking that when I don’t show up for the direct flight to Anchorage that they are going to pull my bags there in Minneapolis. That would not be so good.

When we landed in Seattle I went over to my connecting flight to Anchorage and found that when they had re-booked me in Baxter that they had taken me off the flight from Seattle to Anchorage, and the flight was completely full. I explained to the gate agents what happened and they were able to book me on a different flight that was actually leaving a little earlier. So I hustled over to where my new flight was leaving from and boarded shortly there after. As the plane was being pushed away from the terminal the connecting rod that they push with snapped off. So not only did they have to find another one of those little pusher deals, but they had to have someone come over and inspect the plane to make sure nothing happened in the incident. So after about 45 min of sitting on the airplane we pushed back and were on our way.

We landed in Anchorage and I headed down to baggage claim. Of course my bag didn’t come off the plane I had just landed on, and I was about to file a lost bag claim when I looked over at one of the other bag claim areas and noticed a flight from Minneapolis had just landed. I had a glimmer of hope. My bags should be on that flight since it was the one I was supposed to be on. I waited and waited and finally near the very end when almost everybody had already received their bags and left my bags emerged on the conveyor belt.

Now today my original flight to Unalakleet was supposed to be on Hageland, but I was informed about two hours ago that they canceled their flight for today, so Teresa (BSSD’s Travel Person) was kind enough to rebook me on Pen Air. So that’s where I am now, sitting in the Pen Air gate hoping that my flight will take off in 20 min like it is scheduled to do.

On a side note the weather up there isn’t the best right now. In Unalakleet the wind is blowing 41 mph and gusting to 54 mpg. So the landing could be a little exciting when I get there.

My time in Unalakleet should be pretty short as I am scheduled to head over to St. Michael this afternoon.

I’ll fill you in on how things went when I get to my final destination for the day.

There is something in the Air

I was starting to do a long detailed blog post about the new things that Apple came out with, but then got tired going over all the details that no-one that reads my blog really cares about.  So here it is in brief…

• New airport base station that has a hard drive in it for wireless backup and storage.

• New components on both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  From mail on the Touch to location triangulation in the map feature on both devices.
• Movie rentals from all major movie labels via iTunes.  Movies cost 3.99 for new titles, 2.99 for old titles, and add a dollar to each if you want it in HD on your apple TV.
• Apple TV interface redone adding the movie rental option, flickr photo viewing, .mac photo viewing, and other features I’m not too sure of.
• Finally the thing that people were most interested in….. The new Macbook Air.  This new laptop is the thinest laptop in the world. Weighing in at only 3lbs.  The thickest part of the laptop is only .76 inches.  The thinest point is .16 inches.  It has a 13.3 inch screen, a full size backlit keyboard, standard 2 GB Ram, 80 GB HD (option to upgrade to a 64 GB SSD HD for 1000 dollars) and a 1.6 Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 5 hours of battery life.

The movie rentals I feel are a little too expensive.  You are given up to a month to watch the movie after renting, and once you start playing you have 24 hours to finish it.  You can watch it more than once, but it has to be in that 24 hour time period.  You are able to transfer to your ipod, laptop, or Apple TV.

The Macbook Air’s battery is built into the computer like they are in the iPods.  So if you are flying you can’t take an extra battery with for additional computing time. It does not have an optical drive built in.  You have the option to buy an external super drive for 99 dollars, or they also give you the option to use other machines optical drives on your wireless network both mac and pc.  The Macbook Air only has one USB port, no FireWire ports, no line in, and the line out is not optical.  So if you are a power user that needs these functionalities then the Air is not for you.  If your looking for a super portable laptop then this is the one for you.   They retail at 1799.

Blog Posts from the Past

I just finished up posting all the blog posts from my old static HTML blog I ran while in Brevig Mission.  If you wanna take a look back on what the time was like for me then, all you need to do is click on the “Old Blog” link in the categories section in the sidebar.

Or follow this link….  Past Posts

Hockey and Holidays

Well I know it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been to a couple Wild hockey games in the last month. The first one Erin had a girls night at our house, so I needed somewhere to go. I saw that the wild were playing at home, and started looking for tickets. I found a couple and called up Jesse (April’s soon to be husband) to see if he wanted to go. He lives in the cities so there wouldn’t be much driving for him. He was game, so I ended up getting the tickets off of Craigs List. I drove down and we ended up with some pretty awesome seats. We were about 7 rows up from the glass right by the Wild bench.

The wild lost, but it was fun to be that close to the game. They sure do have some mean looking players. They had one guy named Hill that was pretty tough. He threw some pretty good checks during the game.

The next game I went to with Erin and Katie. Katie had just taken the train over from Tacoma so Erin and I drove down to the cities to pick her up. While we were down there we rented a room in the hotel across the street from the Excel Energy Center (where the wild play) and went to the game that night. We were in the very last row in the upper deck, but there really isn’t a bad seat in the place.

We were lucky enough to attend the game where the Wild played the Rangers. Marian Gaborik scored 5 goals in the game which hadn’t been done for quite some time.

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It was a lot of fun to see.  Very nice to have Erin and Kaite there to watch with.  I wish Erin and I could get to more games.

Christmas was very nice.  Mike and Amanda gave us this sweet Rug.  It is nice on the feet.  Very cushy and brightens up the kitchen.

While we were up at Erins house I worked on the skating rink some more.  There were a few problems though.  First off the snowblower was on the fritz and on top of that it snowed EVERY SINGLE DAY.  You would spend all that energy clearing off the snow, and then the next day you’d have to do it all over again.  I finally gave up on the project, but here is what it looked like.

There were a few trips down to the ice in a little different ware.  As most of you know I spend most of my time in shorts, even in the Winter. So on this occasion I didn’t have a shirt handy so I threw on my parka to run down the the rink for a second.

You really can’t go wrong the bunny boots either.  I think I may try to see if I can get them to be the new rage in the lower 48.  I know they don’t need any more advertising up in Alaska.

I was very lucky to get very nice presents for Christmas.  The geekiest thing I got however was from Jesse and Arpil.  This shirt really fits me not just in size, but also full fills the tech aspect of things.

This sweet shirt actually detects wifi signals.  If there is a signal present it illuminates the radio waves to the right and left of the antenna.  It really works quite well.  If you just have to have this cool shirt you can find one for yourself at thinkgeek.