San Francisco, Part 1

Went to San Fran on Thursday morning. Scheduled to fly out of BWI into Chicago, have a 3 hour layover, then fly out to San Fran.

I stayed up, rather than go to sleep, since I had to be at the airport at 7am. I knew I'd be tired, but since I didn't have any plans for Thursday evening I figured I'd go to sleep early that night. Friday morning I had to be downstairs at 7:30am, so maybe I wouldn't need a magic pill to sleep. That's what I figured.

Airport. The plane gets there. But they delay putting people on because there's a problem with the plane. No details. We wait an hour. People who had short layovers are panicking, because they're not going to make their connection.

It's boring as balls. And to top it off, one of the guys in our party has a diabetic seizure. Falls down, starts spasming. I don't know him well, but I can't believe you wouldn't monitor yourself better...apparently he does this fairly often. I can tell you, if it happened to me once it would never happen in public again.

Just as we're about to take a bus to Dulles to catch a different flight, they say they're going to start boarding the plane.

They start loading people on--I'm the only one in my party to not get on yet as I'm in a different boarding group. I'm in the actual walkway about to get on the plane when a pilot comes out to talk to one of the tarmac guys. I hear him say, "...problem, gonna be a three hour delay".

Uh...super. They send us back out to the waiting area and unload the plane. Then we see this:

The other people in my party were still on the plane. For some reason they were allowed to stay(I think because one of them is an elderly lady).

They don't hear the announcement that "There's a problem with the plane, and it's not minor", but the airline would let us know what the exact deal was when they found out. They say if anyone wants to get on the plane, they are welcome to but they cannot say whether we'll even be taking this plane or not.

I get on the plane and meet up with Luke and the rest of the party. Luke has a T2i with him so I say fuck it, let's shoot some clean plates of the interior of the plane. Who gets to shoot clean plates of an actual empty airplane for free?

The stewardesses didn't care, but informed us not to take THEIR picture as that was against the law. No prob. Only prob is that Luke doesn't have any really nice wide lenses. Had to shoot them with the kit lens, which isn't great.

After about an hour they say we're good to go. They reload the plane and get us in the air. We have rebooked a different flight out so we can make the connection, but it's still gonna give us only 40 minutes to make the connecting flight.

In one of the largest airports in the world. Super.

Flight's cramped, but whatever. I have another brainstorm which is Hey, why not get some airplane ambients with my iphone sound recorder? You never know, right? I even recorded the takeoff and landing which, I'm sure you know, is sort of against the rules. (all electronic equipment off)

So now I have like 25 minutes of airplane interior, with takeoff/landing, and various chit chat, pilot announcements, intercom BINGS and whatnot.

You'd think I'd be able to stop thinking about making movies but you'd be wrong.

In Chicago we BARELY make the connection. After all that we get into San Fran only about 30 minutes after we were supposed to originally.

Taxi to hotel. Check into my room. Am having a hard time keeping my eyes open. Have been awake for 26 hours at that point.

This is the view out of my 35th floor window.
I'm starved though, as we had no time to get any eats in between planes and I wasn't eating plane food. I hit Subway which is right across the street, and am glad to find a 7-11 right around the corner. Couple of 2 liters of Coke Zero, some peanut butter Snickers, and I'm back to the room.

Dead tired, but for some reason can't sleep. I take a magic blue pill at 9:30pm pacific, and have the best sleep of my life. I don't think I moved from then until the alarm rang at 7am.