Spent some time on 8 mile!

Well, not quite. But I did spend all of yesterday in Detroit, MI. Or as most seem to call it, "Detoilet". I can't say too many bad things about it though, we only saw the airport in Pontiac, MI and then to the hotel room to spend the day.

I finally got me a flight to help cure some of the boredom, however, I was flown out on Westjet all the way to Kitchener in order to just do this one flight (totaling 1hr of actually flying to Detroit and back). So, 8hrs of commercial flying for 1 hr of me actually flying. Not too impressed. Oh well, it was "something".

Anyrate, the early morning flight over was uneventful but we knew the flight back was going to be challenging based upon the weather reports for severe thunderstorms between Detroit and Toronto. After having a nap at the hotel the other pilot and I grabbed a coffee and went outside underneath the car park at the entrance to the hotel to watch a massive storm pass directly overhead. I had seen it on the radar on my laptop approaching so we went to see how 'severe' it really was. Well, it was the most intense storm I have seen. Torrential downpours and the lightning was SO close that we could feel the shock waves off the sonic booms the bolts themselves were creating. Twice I was nearly knocked right off my feet by the intensity of some of the strikes which were mere hundreds of feet from where we stood (under cover). We knew then that it was going to be a challenging flight home.

Once at the airport we, along with about 4 other aircraft crews spent nearly 1 hr studying 3 or 4 different radar sources watching the storms all around us and trying to plan our trip home. For us it appeared the weather that had passed over Detroit was due over Kitchener right upon our scheduled arrival time. So we ended up putting off our departure until the storms were right over Kitchener, which should then have just moved off by the time we arrived. We had to plan it like this, because more storms were due to hit Detroit pretty soon. After a brief complete ground stop of all air traffic out of the Detroit area(lots of storms and lots of planes = delays), we finally got approval to depart. We blasted off with our weather radar lighting up with all the storms nearby, but our direct path to Kitchener didn't look too bad. We anticipated this based upon the radar images we watched before departing. We did have to make some deviations (as seen on the image below of our flight path) and we did get into some bumpy air and gusty winds from some precipitating clouds, but the timing worked out perfectly as we approached Kitchener, the storms had just left. We followed Westjet into the airport and landed without much concern. A heck of a lot of work for a 32 min flight!


So after one day of flying, I am now waiting in the hotel lobby for my cab to come and take me to the airport so I can commercially fly back to Calgary tonight. Exciting. The long weekend does look like it's getting pretty darn busy though, so there's a good chance I could end up with some flying.

In other news - I made a rather large purchase last week, not quite an impulse buy, but certainly didn't suspect buying it that day. I now have in my house a Sharp Aquos 42" LCD HDTV. One word to describe it, SEXY. I'll post up my comments and review in the near future when I have more time to play around with it and really tweak some settings and get it operating to it's maximum potential.

Nothing happening = no posts

Well.. simple as that. There is nothing going on here, I'm not working at all, and more or less just hanging around the house in Calgary. We're getting some good weather right now, so lots of time outside and the BBQ is getting a good work out too.

I did manage to get to Vancouver last week for 2 nights, but did get called away in the middle of the trip to go back to Calgary then over to Victoria, before hopping back into Vancouver for the 2nd night.

I have a flight to Seattle booked for 5am on Thursday, but other than that... NOTHING IS HAPPENING.

I'm bored.

BORED

Oh my. Not working very much is driving me insane. Today consisted of waking up at 10:45am, lounging in bed until 1:00pm, making some "lunch", lounging some more, going to grab a coffee and lotto ticket, calculating out possible ideas for winning the $40,000,000 Wednesday draw, watching Ocean's 12, having some dinner and currently struggling with my laptop.

"And that's Tuesday" - in the Joey-esque fashion when he and Ross prank called Chandler at work when Ross wasn't working and Joey was showing him how to occupy all his free time.

As for my laptop, it appears to be a common problem with a bad connection between the dc power connector and the motherboard. Step by step instructions online tell me how to crack it all open and resolder the crappy component. I am a little apprehensive to attempt it, but I really have to choice. In order to get a charge on the laptop I have to hold the power cord just perfectly to ensure a good connection. It irks me greatly.

My boredom will hopefully be extinguished as I do have a scheduled flight to Vancouver this Thursday, hopefully it sticks!

New York Picture Album

Well I loaded these up quicker than I had originally thought. So here they are, 164 pics from my tours around Manhattan.

Check out the photo album by clicking here!

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!