Wow... The past 48 hours have been pretty hectic! I love it! Nah, actually, I'm kidding myself. This trip turned out to be WAY more work than I had anticipated.
2 words.... no autopilot!
So here's how it's been going down--"don't let me dooooown"--and for the record, singing random songs has kept me sane...
SATURDAY/SUNDAY
OK! So I leave Las Vegas on Saturday night. It was a red-eye flight to Raleigh, NC (where I was to pick up the airplane). Normally I can sleep in airplanes, but this flight sucked. Whatever! I get to Atlanta where I wait for the connecting flight and again, no sleep. Now it begins to look like I won't be able to fly it down to Florida as I had originally planned. No biggie, except my buddy was going to be out there waiting for me.. Oh well. I needs mah sleep, yo!
So I finally get to Raleigh and meet with the client. This guy looked like a mix between Santa on vacation and Paul Bunyan-meets-the-city. Seriously, this guy was a 300+ pound guy; tall; with hands that can crush walnuts with ease. He had a gray beard that obeyed no beard laws. It was just doing its own thing, even on the neck area. Oh, and he was balding from the top... but that didn't stop him from keeping it real with his mini ponytail. At any rate, this guy was cool. We meet and I tell him that I couldn't sleep on the red-eye, so he gets me a hotel where the airplane is located. It's in a small town outside of Raleigh. This town’s population is 5,000 at most. We meet and talk business for an hour or two and I head back to my hotel with a beat up 1993 Ford Taurus (a la Conan O'Brien) that he let me borrow. I slept for 7 hours straight before a hotel worker decided to accidentally walk into my room. This occurred at 7pm... it would be over 30 hours before I would sleep again.
MONDAY
En route I get to see where the space shuttle takes off and lands… pretty cool stuff! Anyway, I get to my destination and still have lots to do. First I get the essentials. I rent a raft and get some other small items that we might need for the trip. Secondly, I attempt to taxi the airplane to a maintenance shop on the other side of the airport, so that they can fix whatever bug is wrong. But guess what… once again, it won't start. Fuck! The mechanic comes over and it's just my luck, I can’t get the airplane to duplicate the problem. I was there for half an hour. I felt like a liar whom just wasted a mechanics time. What are you gonna do? We just left it like that. He wished me good luck on the trip.
Finally I get to my hotel room and meet up with Rob. He’s an old buddy of mine from my days in Las Vegas. He decided to join me on this flight just for fun… I didn’t realize how important he’d be to the flight. At any rate, I get to the hotel only to realize that I had several hours of work ahead of me. I stay up until 1:30am prepping for tomorrow’s adventurous flights.
TUESDAY
Rob wakes me up at 5:30am. I'm dead tired! Our plan was to be at the airplane by 6am and takeoff by 7am…. we takeoff a little after 8am. On our way out from the hotel we get a copy of USA Today and see the front page article about pilots and fatigue. Hmm, an omen or a challenge? I'm going with the latter.
We get our clearance and takeoff over Miami. I do my best to throw trash over the American Airlines Arean. As we pass it, we see the last of the good US of A. What’s ahead is nothing but water and some views that these pictures… well, damn, you just had to be there to truly enjoy the beauty. The water changed color from a deep purple to a light cyan. It was really a thing of beauty, the Caribbean.
After passing the Bahamas and seeing a series of both, inhabited and uninhabited islands, we finally made it to our destination- Turks & Caicos! It was pretty neat! I was surprised that jetBlue and several other American airlines flew in there. It felt good. I didn’t feel too away from home. We fuel up and get ready to depart to Puerto Rico, but my dumb butt forgot to let customs know of our arrival (the US is picky about airplanes landing in their territory just out of the blue. Hah! Get it? No? No?! meh!). This leads to a lot of paperwork, an hour delay, and a headache. Needless to say, we got things straightened out and we took off. After 30 minutes of flying, we begin seeing nothing but gray clouds and the deep blue sea. This leg of the trip took us over water for 3 hours, with the closest land (Dominican Republic) being over 100 miles away. This is the main reason we had a raft on board. The flight was just long and arduous, but a few times we did see a couple ships! Hmm, Jack Sparrow perhaps? I mean, it DID look like the Black Pearl... it just had a little more bling, you know? Anyway, I begin to get sleepy. Time keeps dragging on. So I continue to sing the “Folsom Prison Blues” even though I don’t know more than 12 words of the song. Poor Rob.
It becomes painstakingly hard to keep my eyes open, so Rob continues to fly while I catch some much-needed Z’s… aaah, feels good! We encounter some bad weather on the way in, but that’s cool! There’s nothing like being dead tired and shooting a precision approach with bad weather at an unfamiliar place (sarcasm). No really, though.. it was actually pretty cool once we saw land. The whole water thing was starting to get old.
So here we are. We are in our hotel room in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We’re planning our trip through the remaining islands in the Caribbean. This time we’re gonna rest! I don’t care if we get delayed a day, damn it! I am going to sleep tonight!
Amor y paz!
Cheers!!!
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