It's Off to Indonesia

Day 1, January 11.

We actually started on Jan 10 but only just before midnight on the 10th. Trip to LA was uneventful. We did get upgraded to first class on the flight from Anchorage to LA. That was nice. Had two drinks and a chicken salad. Got free digi-players as well. Check-in with American was easier than I thought it would be. Going through LAX was pretty painless except for the lack of sleep. Bonnie is feeling poorly this morning. I think it’s a combination of the stress in getting ready for the trip and the lack of sleep on the red-eye to LA. She is lying on the floor in the terminal right now trying to get some rest. Would be nice if the rest of the day was a first class day as well. We will see.
      

Getting Ready To Go

Our plane reservations are made and the four of us will be traveling at least part of the way together. Bonnie, Megan, and I will be leaving from Anchorage together and Melanie will be flying from Dubai to Cairo and back with us. Working on getting pictures to submit with the application for the Egyptian visas. My color printer for some reason no longer prints blue so had to go to Costco to get prints. I had the pictures cropped too much so will have to go back and do them over so they can be cut down to 2X2. Sometimes one wonders why they have such requirements for visas. We will be flying on Alaska Airlines and Emirates. The trip from Seattle to Dubai is 14 hours 45 minutes or so, a long time. But at least we don't have to be to the airport in Anchorage until about 9 AM the day we leave instead of taking the usual red-eye flight out. At least that part will be more pleasant. Much more to do in the next two and half months for the trip. Also need to get my retirement papers in order and turned in but that's another story for another day.

Anchorage to Seattle

This has been a wonderful beginning to our trip. In the last post I said we couldn't get on a different flight to Seattle. Well, we indeed did. When we got off the plane in Juneau, AK we went straight to the ticket counter and asked if there was another flight that might get us to Seattle earlier? Lo and behold, they gave us seats on the plane we just got off from and away we went. So instead of getting to Seattle at 9 PM we arrived at 4 PM. We will now be able to get a good night's sleep before the grueling flight to London. Another good thing happened while we were checking in at Anchorage, Alaska Airlines checked our bag all the way to London. That is really wonderful. We won't have to worry about that until Saturday morning. Hopefully it will get there.

Something else didn't happen as well that we were worried about. Mt. Redoubt remained quiet at least until we left. Have no idea what it's doing now and don't really care!

I did pack the SD card reader in the checked bag so I can't update any of the pics until Saturday. I'm not going to buy another because we already have three. Obviously I've done something similar before.

We are supposed to leave at 7:50 AM tomorrow for New York and the Seattle airport doesn't have "public" wifi so won't have an entry until New York or London. Don't know what the wifi situation is at JFK in New York. So hope the rest of the trip goes as well as this part has so far. More later.

Weather update

The weather in London has been improving though I'm sure it can be pretty bad in March. In a browser key "weather in London" as a search argument or use this link http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/03772.html if you want to check on the weather like I do most every day. Hope the next two weeks improve even more than the last three have. At least the days are getting longer even over in the United Kingdom.

The weather in Cairo is about the same as I wrote last time. The night time temps have come up some but the daytime temps are about the same. I'm sure with the longer days they will be getting warner during the day as well. Checking on Cairo weather use http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/62366.html.

Weather in Anchorage is mid 30s F daytime and mid 20s F evenings so both locations are much better than here. It would be really nice to have and early "summer" on this trip and then come back to spring. That would really be fantastic.

We have gotten an itinerary from Nardeen so will post that here one of these days before we leave. We still need to sit down and decide what we are going to do in London for the three days we will be there. More on all of this later.