9:45 AM Pacific Time Zone
Well I have boarded and flown for the majority of my Anchorage to Seattle flight. I remember the spiel that the flight attendants gave us about the safety features and procedures of the Boeing 737 and it’s actual take off. After that, I’m a totally blank slate. I zonked out pretty quickly and only after counting my blessings for the lack of my middle seat partner. I picked out the interior seat of a three-person row, and was pretty calm when my isle-seat companion arrived. Although he had been “that guy” who angrily mouths the words of the song blasting in his ears through black earbuds and you can’t quite tell his age, mostly due to the college appropriate wardrobe that clashes with the late 30ish wrinkle lines. Apparently there had been a lot of laughs in this guy’s past based upon the amounts of lines that formed when he would get really intense emotions over a particular lyric of a song. Thankfully this was the only real “character building” aspect of this leg of the journey.
I am totally amazed whenever I get onto a real life plane, not a SAAB from PenAir. Flying on these little guys is like using the last teensiest bit of toothpaste from travel-sized toothpaste tube; a small vessel that provides you with the essential usage of the full sized version, but you struggle to make it through the process. I know that I’m no slouch when it comes to height versus other women, but I still qualify as the same fit as the average sized male with my 5’9” frame, and even I find the SAABs to lack the necessary size to make me comfortable sitting for 3-4 hours at a time. Knees wedge between my captain’s chair and the one in front, and that’s not even when you factor in the automatic reclining feature that 30 years of use has offered the PenAir customer. No need to bother hitting buttons when simple posture pressure will do the trick for you. But flying to Seattle has made me feel like a queen amongst, well other royalty and their superiors I suppose since I’m in a filled cabin of other Economy passengers behind the First Class folks. But you get the idea.
I always like flying because you can look out of the windows and if it’s during the daytime, no matter the time of year or day you’ll see the sunshine. As I peer out of my window, that’s got the shade available for me to operate if I’d rather take the brightness down a notch, I see clouds with a few breaks scattered amongst them. There’s something that cheers you up about seeing consistent sun after living on an island when you have to soak up the sporadic rays. It would be a much different perspective on the weather if I were a few thousand feet lower. I would be looking up and hoping for the progression of Spring to quicken its pace. Either way, I would be grateful for what I got. It’s also pretty amazing to see stretches of land again. It’s a little bit misleading flying over western Alaska on your way to Anchorage. You see a blotch of island as you take off and then it’s all blue seas and white clouds until the peaks and valleys of land replace them. It’s almost like a blank of confectioners sugar has been shifted on the terrain, and so you go from one constant palate of color to another. This isn’t the landscape that I grew up on, so it’s still amazing to me. I suppose it would be a rather sad day when flying over such majestic beauty becomes mundane.
With the captain’s special offer for a pre-approved Visa card with bonuses for filling out an application fills my ears and I roll my eyes at how we can’t even take a flight without having commercials jammed down our throats, I think I’ll call this installment finished. I’ll be in Seattle for a few hours; we can start boarding the Delta flight bound for Detroit at 12:30PM. That’ll give me just enough time to spruce up my 4PM makeup and hairdo.
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