Big Day for Elevation Gain

My seat on the plane to Omaha was right over the wing. It reminded me of the "Twilight Zone" episode where William Shatner sees a strange monster out there messing up the engines. Thankfully, my flight was uneventful.

Yesterday was a travel day. The hectic and somewhat grueling way it unfolded kept me from posting. Today is the first day of RAGBRAI and things are much better now.

My flight out of charmingly unpretentious Long Beach Airport on America West was a little strange. The connector flight to Phoenix was on a Bombardier CRJ900, a Canadian aircraft that was surprisingly tiny. As I was bording I saw the luggage going up the conveyor belt and I wondered "How will they get my bike case into that little cargo door?"

Quite a few people in the airport had laptops, but I decided to go minimal on electronic equipment on this trip. Baggage trucks, camping, and the land of the sudden thunderstorm all argued against any sort of computer equipment.

As I was going to my connector flight at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix I fell in behind a guy in a wheelchair being pushed by an energetic airport employee. First paceline of the trip!

Bought the Arizona Republic and read it on the flight. The Question of the Day to local Columnist Clay Thompson began: "I have been thinking a lot lately about electric eels. Could enough of them power a house?" Mr. Thompson prefaced his answer by saying this is the sort of question that comes in when the weather gets hot and people are cooped up indoors.

I'll tell you about my arrival in Le Mars and my first impressions of RAGBRAI in the next post.