Raven Travels: FLYING TO THE EAGLES

Wednesday, 30 January>>>

Yesterday was spent running errands, doing exercises, and packing. Lin also called to say that she had really come down with a bad cold. It turns out there was also some flu symptoms thrown in. I got my gear organized and packed before dinner so that Lin would have my office to herself. Lin arrived about 2125. and headed directly to a hot bath, followed by bed.

We followed the path to bed as reville was to be at 0430 today. George got us to the airport by a little after 0600 for our scheduled departure at 0805. Security went well for me, but Lin got pulled over for something in her roll-on. They scanned twice before finally finding a small knife that she had completely forgotten about. The bag had been through security at airports a number of time since she purchased the knife in March 2010!!

The weather today was not particularly good for flying to the center of the country. We made it fine to Denver though the flight was full. The Denver Airport is huge. It is a long way from gate B28 to B80, and that is only one concourse. The flight to Cedar Rapids was over booked and they were looking for people to stay the night in Denver. We thought of taking them up on it but the connections would not have worked for our schedule. The weather in Cedar Rapids had been snow all day with winds to 25 mph. This was the first major storm of the winter for them, and schools were also cancelled.

As we were going to have to drive in the dark in snow and winds gusting to 35 mph we opted to spend the night at the Super 8 here in Cedar Rapids. Our hosts in the Davenport area strongly approved our decision. We will be off to bed by about 2100. We will await sunshine before heading out tomorrow morning. There will be cold and wind, but the weather generally will be clearing.

Here are a couple of pictures from our flight from San Diego to Denver. I got some good photos of San Diego from the air. We had a sunny flight and came closer to the Grand Canyon this time. I could easily identify Cape Royal and Wotan's Throne. We flew almost directly over Dessert View located at the East entrance to the park.

Dinner tonight was a salad from MacDonald's. This was the first time I have eaten a McDonald's meal! It was quite good actually. I enjoyed a Southwest Salad which came with Paul Newman salad
dressing. So you can see they are improving their choices. We opted for this as it was practically next door to the motel and we were able to pick it up before checking in and thus avoided having to go out again in the weather.