New York!

Wow. New York rocked.

I've always want to go and see the place and finally got the opportunity for free! It was a lengthy 4hr and 25 min flight to New York direct from Edmonton (we were watching the fuel gauges pretty darn closely). But we arrived to perfect weather. 28 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. There wasn't even any haze to be seen either.

We stayed in a Hilton near the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. This is a very popular private and corporate airport that serves New York. All the major airports are very, very busy and this one is just a little more convenient. The day after we arrived we were awake pretty early and headed out to a bus stop and bussed right into times square. It was another glorious day and we took full advantage. We walked all over the damn place, probably close to 15miles by the time it was all said and done with. We checked out Times Square, the Ed Sullivan Theater (where Letterman does the Late Show), Central Park, 5th Ave, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (didn't actually go in though aside from the lobby), Trump Tower, Rockefeller Center/Plaza, NBC Studios, Empire State Building (didn't go up), Bryant Park and a bunch of other little areas all in between.

On the way back I accidentally had us jump off the bus 1 stop too quickly and that added about 15 more mins of walking to our return to the hotel. That was a tough walk back as we were already exhausted from all of our travels that day already.

I will post up a photo album in the next couple of days to showcase our walking tour of New York. If I get to go there again soon I'd like to check out Wall Street, Canal Street (China Town) and Ground Zero. All of those places were quite far down south of where we were and it was rush hour madness, so we opted to skip out.

As for right now, I'm on days off enjoying the awesome weekend weather in Calgary. Was out biking around the rivers downtown, had a beer on the patio with roommates and friends, lots of BBQ'ing and other summer activities. A great weekend!

Back from Toronto, straight into work

Finally some work! Although I wasn't a big fan of having to drive up to Edmonton yet again in a rental car, but it's worth it for my next destination.

Currently in Edmonton now at the hotel, just hanging out here for a departure tomorrow morning out to New York City! Can't wait! We fly into the Teterboro airport and will be staying at a Hilton hotel in New Jersey. I have all the tips and tricks from coworkers though on how to catch a quick and cheap bus right into downtown.

So I shall be spending quite a bit of time touring around New York. I'm really looking forward to it. It is high on my list of "to visit places" and there aren't many of those left these days!

As for my past weekend in Toronto, it was a great time! Bonnie is now a married woman to Jim and the ceremony and reception went off exceptionally well. Bonnie was a beautiful bride and I was happy to have been able to make it out for the occasion. The wedding was on Saturday and so the other days John and I toured around downtown and visited some other sites and had a good time. Howard was able to meet up with us on Friday night and show us around downtown a bit. We ended up at a cool little pub which had something like 250 beers from around the world. I've already forgotten the name of the beer I had but it was damn tasty, like a Kilkenney, but better!

My nose is a little red after getting a bit of sun on the sunny/high overcast day of the wedding. I imagine that I'll get quite a bit more sun in New York City this week too so I have brought along the sunscreen to make sure I'm well prepared. Looks like the temps will be close to the 30's.

My next post might be from New York, and if not, it will be upon my return. I plan to take many many pictures and will post them up eventually after I get back. Until then!

Wedding Bells

It's starting to happen, friends are marrying off!

This weekend I'm in Toronto to attend Bonnie's marriage to Jim Saturday in Richmond Hill. Weather looks like it will hold for a nice outdoor ceremony and then later it's off to the Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto for the reception.

I just so happened to cash in some of my Hilton Honor points and am staying for free for 2 nights in the Hilton downtown Toronto. I priced it out, this should be costing me $250/nt. Not a bad deal for free! The Metropolitan hotel is an easy 10 min walk away so that's all good too. Also, Westjet footed most of the bill for this flight after having lost my bags prior to my Puerto Rico trip. So all in all, I'm coming out pretty good for this trip so far!

Rain, Snow, Hail, all in a holiday weekend

Well, May long weekend has brought all sorts of weather here to Calgary. We've seen bits of everything. Seems about right, first long weekend during actual spring time in Calgary and weather goes to shit.

Oh well. It didn't stop my roommates and I from going out during some of the dry times to crank up the mini bike. You may recall from last year having some fun on this miniature sport bike. It is just way too much fun, and I'm sure we've pissed off all the neighbours, but you can see that they can't help but laugh. My cheeks are sore just from that very simple fact, that you can't help but laugh.

Here are a couple pics from the weekend fun. I feel more confident on this thing than from last year, frequently taking it up to it's top speed of 45 km/hr - which is damn fast when you're only a couple inches off the ground!

Let the mayhem begin
Full speed coming up the hill by our house
My roommate Jeff taking his first turn on the bike, he opted for some protective hockey goalie headgear :)

Flying.. woo hoo!

So I finally get to do some flying out of Kitchener, I won't return back to Calgary having not flown anything. Except it's kind of funny that we fly empty all the way over to Las Vegas and then do a quick little hop over to Palm Springs. That's about 5 hours of empty flying just to do a quick little 35 min flight! Oh well. I fly where they tell me to fly.

I'll spend 2 nights in the nice Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs (the one with the 42" plasma tvs). Temps look very warm over there, I won't make the same mistake I did last time and not put on any sunscreen. Thursday we will end up flying over to Santa Ana California to take some folks from there up to Edmonton. Then I'll drive home that night and be in Calgary by around 10pm most likely.

I end up losing one of my "guaranteed" days off as a result. I'll be compensated, and it's not like I've got much on the go, so it's ok. I've got some days booked off to go to Bonnie's wedding coming up in a couple of weeks so there better not be any trying to take those days, they'll have to work something else out then! It's a very rare occurrence that they get stuck and need people to work a day off. Especially considering we have so many pilots right now.

Oh, a funny thing just happened. I bumped into another Calgary Jet First Officer who has also been out east for a long time. We're on the same hotel floor and everything. Our rooms are 8 ft apart and neither of us knew the other was here! We have been eating alone and hanging out by ourselves and on the last day that either of us are here, we bump into each other... yeesh, you'd think someone in our company would have mentioned we were both here. Oh well. We'll be heading out to dinner shortly.

Off to Ontario for a few days

Not much blogging lately, that's because not much is happening. I haven't been getting any flights as we have too many pilots in my position right now with some new guys who need their initial training. So they generally get a bit of priority so they can be fully signed off to fly with all the crews.

There is a plane in Kitchner, ON and my room mate Mike had been out there with it, but he goes on his days off tomorrow, so he's flying back on Westjet right now, and I will fly out tomorrow morning to take over hanging out.

So, no flights actually planned, just hanging out with the plane if any flights do come up. That means that instead of sitting on my ass not flying in Calgary, now I'll be doing the same out in Ontario. I'll be flown back on Wednesday if no flights come up that can bring back earlier than that. Thursday begin my actual days off, so if the plane is still out there I imagine they'll fly out another guy to cover.

Other news, I finally got my new tires mounted. I've kept the old rubber as I found a buyer who'll take them off me for $20 each, which helps pay for the mounting and balancing costs. I'm glad I had won 2 of the tires already because it was a hefty bill even if just for 2 tires and the mounting. The Yokohama AVSES100's do look mighty sexy and handle great though.

Well, off to Toronto bright and early tomorrow. So maybe I'll post from out there.

Mazatlan no more

Oh well, I couldn't really count on it, and the schedule changed around a bunch so I didn't get to go on the trip today to Mazatlan MX.

There is also nothing else on the schedule for me. In the near future I see some Las Vegas trips and a Chicago trip, so maybe I'll get one of those.

Did I wake up in Vancouver???

You think I'd be living in Vancouver with a forecast like this:

Nope, just a weird day in Calgary. Our annual rainfall here in Calgary is around 300mm (Vancouver is 1120mm!) so when it starts to rain this hard, it's quite unusual. We're essentially getting 10% of our annual rainfall over the next 24hrs!

As I'm typing this out our power just went out. Hmmm, something to do with all this water perhaps!? More likely somebody just drove into a power transformer after panicking from having to use their windshield wipers. Much the same way a Vancouver driver panics when the snow starts flying and they start driving into ditches all over town. Oh, it only last 10 minutes, the power just came back to life. Fewph, not much to do on a rainy day in Calgary, I needed the power!

One good thing that will come out of this nice heavy rainfall will be a bit of a road clean. Most of the neighborhoods have now had the street sweepers come through and clear away most of the left over winter gravel, but it is still pretty dusty and dirty around places. So hopefully this will help clean up some of these streets. That's one thing I miss about Vancouver, the nice clean streets, no gravel, no road salt etc.

Mexico, Mazatlan MX to be exact...

I'm off to Mexico for a week! A very nice upcoming trip to Mazatlan Mexico from May 6th to the 12th. I hope this trip sticks, as my last nice layover didn't quite happen.


Mazatlan isn't quite a resorty town like Cabo, Cancun or Puerto Vallarta, but it still is a rather nice piece of real estate. I imagine we'll be put up in a decent hotel and or all inclusive resort. I'm not working much, so if I'm not going to be working, I may as well not be working in Mexico! :)

WWII Aircraft Carrier Operations

Somebody had posted this movie link in one of the Aviation forums that I frequent.

It's an amazing little video spliced together of some of the first carrier operations, back in the hay day when it was still very new. Even today it's still very dangerous, but take a look at how it used to be done. A different world.

Facebook

Well, I've joined the facebook craze.

You can search me out there if you have it too. I've only been on it for a week and the amount of people that keep messaging me continues to amaze me. People from back in high school, college, old friends, cousins, even my sister found me.

It's a fun little tool, I'll have to post some pictures up there because I have other photos that aren't that great that other people have in their albums of me and then tagged me into that album so they show up on my account.. I need some better ones. Haha.

Well, back to facebook, I just had another email pop up that somebody has likely added me as a friend as I was typing out this post.

Sun burnt

Well, I return from Palm Springs, after getting a longer layover than I had anticipated, and I'm sun burnt!

We had a good time, as we met up with another jet crew who had brought a plane in the day before. So we partied it up with them a little bit and we had a rental car so we could all get around pretty easily. The first day was actually windy, cold and rainy, but the next 2 days proved to be perfect - 25 degrees and sunny. Great poolside weather, which is where I obtained a wee bit too much sun.

Our trip ended up changing, so we stayed in Palm Springs until today (Sunday) and then flew over to another little airport in Bermuda Dunes which is right next to Palm Springs and picked up a group of 7 guys and a massive amount of bags. We had to get creative, but we fit them all on board.

I managed to catch both the Flames game and Canucks game last night. What a disappointment, those damn Canucks need to pull it together!

Well, looks like I'm in Calgary for a few days at least, time to go back to nursing my sunburn.

Palm Springs until Sunday

Well, finally I get a trip to Palm Springs and actually get to stay more than 12 hours. Unfortunately, the weather isn't that great! It's cold, windy, cloudy and even a bit of rain. I'm here until Sunday though so I think tomorrow and Sunday should be much nicer days. I'm looking forward to baking in the sun a bit.

Got a call out yesterday kind of last minute. So I stay in Palm Springs until Sunday, and then we head up to Edmonton to drop some folks off and then back to Calgary.

Flying on the jet, but not flying

My days off start today and I was lucky enough to spot that one of our jets is flying to Vancouver empty this afternoon to do a pickup. So I am hoping on the flight in the back to live it up for the hour flight to Vancouver. I'll be sticking around until Wednesday and will catch both of the Vancouver games while back (on TV of course as they're playing in Dallas now).

wednesday I'll Westjet back to Calgary. It's a shame we don't have any travel perks set up with any of the airlines as I could then travel for a fraction of the cost, but every once and a while I can hop on these empty flights within our own fleet and that's not too shabby either.

Go Canucks Go!

Holy Quadruple OT Batman!

That was quite the game there last night when the Canucks and Stars went into quadruple overtime before finally Henrik Sedin finished her off to make the game winner.

The first 3 periods were pretty good with the back and forth, but man, you could tell they were very tired as the OT periods just kept going and going. It was really up to the goalies at that point. Luongo made some amazing saves.

I was hooting and hollering from my house here in Calgary with my Canucks jersey on, but eventually ended up watching the game end in bed because the game went so damn long!

Go Canucks Go!