Aerospace Horror: Part 1
So the trick on making a US roadtrip cheaper for half of the participants (Pim) is to make up a great excuse to be in the States at around the time the roadtrip starts :-) It turns out that the bi-annual promotion committee at Google is in April 2010, and I am on that committee. So I decided to fly out to the Bay Area on 4/10, stay there for two weeks, and then do the road trip from 4/24-5/15 with Paul. OK, so far so good. For some reason or other, my success rate with international travel is extremely poor. There was this one time that our flight was delayed 5hrs (with us in the plane!) because of a set of USRP refugees coming on-board at Paris’ CDG, then having to de-ice, and then having to wait in line for take off, and then having the captain find out that there is a hydrolics failure, and then having to taxi back, then having to wait in the plane for the repairman, then having to wait in the plane for the air marshall to sign off on the log, then having to de-ice again (!), and then .. oh wait, that was that one time, but not /this/ time :)
Right, so I’m in the second leg of our journey, on a plane from JFK to SFO with Alexis and Marina [3yo daughter and girlfriend] and about 30min after we were to depart, the captain says ‘Sorry, hydrolics failure, but you can stay onboard while we fix it’. An hour later, ‘Sorry, change of plans, it’s in your best interest to de-board’ and then hanging out for +2hrs creating a 3+ hour delay at the gate. Sigh. Somehow, I always get the screwy flights. AA177 FAIL!
We landed at the San Francisco airport at around 1am, rented a car (a pretty cool one, a 2010 Ford Taurus with ~3K miles on the odo), and drove our way south to Mountain View, picking up groceries and the apartment keys. We were in bed at around 3am pacific time. Considering we got up at 7am central european time, and we crashed at 3+9=noon the next day, we had pulled a 29hr itinerary. Somehow that doesn’t add up .. I hate to travel ZRH-JFK-SFO, I much prefer ZRH-SFO or ZRH-{MUN, FRA, AMS, CDG}-SFO because the long haul flight is so much shorter.
Anyway, here I am in the corp apt in Mountain View, working for the upcoming two weeks. We already went to Monterey Aquarium yesterday (Sunday), and we all had fun. Paul was a bit jealous :)