Back home and burnt... with a bit of news

Well.. I guess I'll start off with the news. It was our last day in Scottsdale and the other pilot and I had just finished eating at Earls on the patio in the gorgeous Arizona night warmth when my phone rang. It was my immediate boss. A couple of scenarios rushed through my head. 1. I was fired. :) 2. I did something really stupid. Or 3. It was to be good news.

It was 3. I was offered the position on the Jet (Citation Excel) and after a couple of minutes confirming some details in that regard, I accepted! So, this summer I will be going on a 2 week course down in Texas somewhere to be trained up on the plane. All of the flying is done in full motion simulators and even the tests and exams are done this way. Once that's completed I will be licensed to fly the plane and can officially begin flying it with AirSprint.

So yeah, should be great. Good plane, gets me all sorts of good experience, great destinations (read - more Mexico, Arizona and even further south trips). It also is a decent pay raise, but it also locks me into the company for 2 years on a "training bond" which is simply an agreement between me and the company that if I leave before those 2 years are up, I'll owe whatever is leftover for the cost of the training. Which is UBER expensive. But I don't foresee leaving anytime soon.

So yah, that's the good news! And now onto the layover! We spent an awesome 4 nights there. The flight down sucked though, we were bucking headwinds and turbulence in and out of the tops of some nasty clouds the whole time. Not a very pleasant flight by anymeans. And a windstorm had been developing in Phoenix that day and so the descent into Scottsdale was pretty wild. A bit of a dust storm even picked up a little bit later and left the plane covered in a thin layer of dust and crap when we returned back to the airport on our departure date.

We had a rental car and a good hotel, and the only day that was bad weather was the first day. And that was only because it was windy. The temps were great hovering just below 30 degrees celsius in the day and then a very nice 22-25 degrees in the evening. We toured around quite a bit. Did the whole touristy thing in and around Phoenix. We went out to a couple of parks on the outskirkts of town and really got into the desert and did some hiking on some neat trails. Lots of Cacti and cool desert landscape.

We listened to a Latin vibe music station down there that was really quite good! It had a lot of great Latin beats in both English and Spanish. The new Shakira song (Hips don't lie) was always playing and slowly developed into the anthem for our trip. It would come on the radio and we'd turn up the volume and groove out to the tunes.

All in all this was a great trip, mainly because we had the ability to drive around and check things out and weren't stuck to walking to places just around the hotel. I finished reading The Da Vinci Code which was good, and we also spent some time just chilling outside by the pool. Now I'm on days off and my Dad is in town visiting. How'd he get here? Haha, he hitched a ride on his very own private aircraft. :)

The people we flew back from Scottsdale were going to Vancouver, so we dropped them there and we were to reposition back to Calgary empty. So I made some arrangements and my Dad was able to fly back with us. My Mom was not as willing, as she HATES flying and so she stayed at home. But yeah, so my Dad hoped on board and after we got into cruise the other pilot went back and chilled out in the back of the plane and my dad came up and sat in the cockpit with me for the majority of the flight up until about 2 mins before descending into Calgary. He even got to input a bunch of the waypoints into the GPS and select the autopilot to fly them. It was also a great flight back up all the way from Scottsdale. No clouds to be found except over Vancouver. We even flew right over Las Vegas on our way back and had a clear view of the strip. A much more pleasant experience than our trip down. And the flight into Calgary was great too, a nice view of all the mountain ranges which my Dad enjoyed seeing from a different perspective.

Well, off to a family get together. See the relatives that I haven't even seen since I've been in Calgary all this time. No excuses now!