The Engineered Boulderer

As is so often the case when we travel, we scouted the cheapest tickets we could find for our trip to Boston. Like most other times, the cheapest were once again KLM.

I have mixed experiences flying with KLM. When I flew to LA to study the plane touched down so hard that the overhead bin right about me popped open (trust me, it wasn’t overloaded). Also, they managed to ruin my mountain bike on that trip, which fortunately resulted in me getting a new one. Still, it is quite unsettling to find ones bike lying in a pile of debris.

Understandably, it took a little back and forth argumentation before finally buying the tickets. As it turned out flying over there was a breeze. We checked in online and got decent seats: Aisle and window on the flight to Amsterdam and aisle and middle for the transatlantic flight.

The transatlantic fligth was an Airbus A-330, and it was “underbooked” (a rare occurence in civil aviation today). This meant that the other middle seat, of a 2-4-2 configuration was empty so the middle four seats were Susan, me, empty, and some other guy. This allowed me to stow my backpack in front of the seat next to me which really made my day, especially considering there were some plastic containers beneath almost all the seats so I could not stretch out my feet. Would have been really bad if I couldn’t have stowed my bag somewhere else (I found out on the return trip that it was, but I’ll save that for a later post).

The flight was a Northwest flight, and it was actually pretty nice. We had a personal “entertainment” system, so I saw Man on Fire and played Bejeweled all the way. We had Uncle Ben’s meals which were alright (but no more than that), and finally landed in Boston after almost 8 hours in the air.

Although the flight out was better than the flight home, I still found myself wishing for the invention of wormholes so we could instantly travel from destination to destination without all those problems associated with air travel (or travel in general).

After we landed we had to get through immigration, and although we landed a little early, it ended up taking more than an hour from leaving the plane, until we had our bags and were out in the fresh air. This was our first flight into the states after 9/11, and although it was a long wait, it was no worse than I remember from the mid and late 90’s.

Outside we were met by Garreth, and had to go get our rented car, but more on that later.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Hobbies, Just Thoughts, Life, Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.