Post-travel notes

I am happy to be writing this. For much of the day, I've been wandering around, absolutely miserable: general achiness, a feeling of weakness (like picking up anything over 20 pounds would've been impossible), tiredness, chills, all kinds of stuff.

But I got up a little while ago after a nap that lasted around three hours (and one of several I've taken today). This is the best I've felt all day; though it's not perfect, it's a heck of a lot better than the general sense of drudgery that has otherwise been the hallmark of the day.

Given that I've (sort of) recovered, I don't think it was any sort of bug or illness - just my body saying, 'Hey, asshole, your tank's on 'E' and it's about time you gave it a rest.' Yes sir, I am listening.

So I'm doing much better, thanks.

Thursday, travel day, was an interesting one. As we had on the way out, we took a prop plane from Redmond (near Bend) to Seattle. The flight is surprisingly short, considering it's like a 6-hour drive.

Once in Seattle, we didn't have a whole lot of time to mess around, maybe an hour or so. Plus they were trying to speed up our departure time, since snow was on its way. Indeed, though it was raining, it had changed over to snow by the time we took off. (I did mention to my wife that I was thoroughly disappointed we didn't see better weather in Seattle.)

We did have a treat for the flight back to D.C. As we did on the way out, we took a Boeing 737-800 (like this one); coming back, we were treated to a special paint job celebrating Alaska's 75th anniversary - a gorgeous retro livery.

The flight itself was pretty quiet. Because of the intermittent bad weather, we had some minor turbulence from time to time, but nothing too bad.

Just before we began our descent, the pilot announced that we'd be flying the River Visual into National (here's a wing view and pilot's view) unless air traffic control switched runways on us.

Well, they did, and now we'd be approaching from the south. Still, we had an interesting view as we banked over Mt. Vernon on the way up the river.

We landed without incident and were on our way...

-- I FEEL AS IF I should apologize for the disjointed nature of the post. My mind still isn't totally with it, but as I said, it is a great improvement.