The regular travels of a blogger

Yesterday was a bit of a long day, though it wasn't too bad overall. My travel days when I come to Iowa to see the folks are always like this, since I take the bus from Vancouver to Seattle and then fly out of there (it is so much cheaper than flying out of Vancouver).  To avoid border line-ups, I take the first bus, which leaves around 4:00 am and gets down to Seattle around 9:30.

There's something eerily surreal about Vancouver in the dead of night.  I wrote a blog post about it on my iPhone yesterday morning while I was on the bus, but for some reason my iPhone Blogpress app ate the damned thing (grumble, grumble).  But here's my view while I'm waiting for the bus.

(click to enlarge image)

It's obviously not the city that never sleeps, but there usually is something going on, even if it's just the occasional taxi or a few late-night workers walking home.  In fact, I had a taxi slowly crawl up to the bus stop where I was waiting, stop the car for about 30 seconds, then slowly drive into the hotel parking lot where a lot of the taxis wait.  He then came to the sidewalk to throw something away and asked me if I needed a cab.  Gee, I wonder what the answer to that question is, considering I didn't do anything when you stopped in front of me?
Anyway, I had a nice trip down.  The bus has wi-fi, so those of you who follow me on Twitter could keep up to date.  I did take some time to just listen to music and read my book as well (David Arkenstone music and Greg Iles' latest book!).  I did do a lot of tweeting and Facebook, though, which I guess means that this post definitely applies to me in at least some sense.

We reached Seatac airport around 9:30 and I had a 12:10 flight, so I had time to grab some breakfast.  Check-in and security were both really easy (security's always annoying, but at least it didn't take too long) so I had a lot of time to just sit and relax.  Most importantly, unlike my Christmas trip, the wi-fi at the airport was working!  So I was able to stay connected, including finding out that one of my favourite Vancouver Canucks, Ryan Kesler, signed a 6-year contract extension with the team.  Woohoo!!!  I also have Skype on my iPhone, and since I had some time to kill and I love playing with new gadgets, I decided "hey, let's call Mom from the airport!"  Unfortunately, she wasn't home, so the thrill of joining the herd of other people on their phones at the airport was denied me.  My initiation into the group was not to be.

The flight to Chicago was great, if a bit long (I was getting a little stiff).  I had 20 minutes to get to my Moline connection gate, but thankfully the distance between the gates was not the usual 20 miles (arrival gate was H6 and departure gate was H1B).  Unfortunately, the wi-fi at O'Hare wasn't working with my phone, so I couldn't do anything there.

I got on the plane in the very first seat, so far up in front that there was no overhead luggage bin above me.  I was wondering how to avoid having to go backward to get my bag when we landed, but the flight attendant was nice enough to let me use their storage locker.  This being an extremely short regional jump, there was only one attendant and so they didn't need to make use of all of it.

This is when the problems started, of course.  There were three technical problems with the plane that happened one right after the other (they couldn't happen all at once?) and so our flight was delayed about 40 minutes.  Thus, I was able to have a nice chat with the attendant, who really didn't have anything to do.  Everybody was seated and it wasn't time to pass out the bag of nuts (as opposed to the planeful of nuts that we were already in) so she stood up front and talked to me for a while.  We talked about airline stuff, how stressful it was after the Christmas Day Bomber event happened, that sort of thing.  It passed the time very well, and when she was busy, I went back to my book (I ended up finishing almost half of my 700 page book on this trip).

Landed in Moline with no problem, only to find Dad there waiting for me.  No Mom.  They had some technical problems of their own, with the car battery dying on the road, so she was dealing with that.  We got home with no problem, though, and it was nice to finally not be on the move.

All told, I was awake and on the move from 3:00 am Pacific to 7:30 pm Pacific.  Not as bad as some days, but still long.

It was really cold when I got here, but that was it.  Of course, I woke up to this.

No, that's not an old picture, the date on the parents' camera just won't stay set.  This is our backyard this morning.

It's like God said "hey, Dave's going to Iowa.  Let's dump some snow on him."

Yes, I can definitely say that I'm home now.

Though as I said at Christmas (and why come up with something new when I can take advantage of my previous creativity?):

"I'm lucky that I'm going 'home' on both ends of the trip."