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October 29, 2005
Fun in Florida
This morning, at approximately 8:30 am, I arrived at the airport in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida to pick up my wife, who flew out to spend the next week with me. Of course, I will be working during the day this coming Monday through Friday, but we will have this weekend and the evenings, together.
Her flight was a little delayed, so I ended up waiting around in the airport for her. Of course, I could not go through security to meet her, so I waited near where she would be coming out. The one thing that can be irritating sometimes about flying or meeting people who are flying is that some delays are considered short enough to not be worth reporting to the masses. In many cases these unworthy-of-effort-to-report delays are long enough to make you wonder whats going on. Her flight was about 1 hour later than "advertised", even on the display boards in the airport.
So, I had tried to phone her and see if I had just missed her and she was waiting for me somewhere else in (or outside of) the airport. It's such a small airport that I didn't think it likely, but, you never know. She actually answered her phone just after I saw her walking out through security. She asked me, "where are you?" and I said, "About 30 feet in front of you." She thought that was pretty funny, as she had looked up and saw me as I answered.
After collecting her luggage, we went to the hotel, gave here the "grand tour" and dropped the bags. Then, we went out for breakfast (at an IHOP. After that, we went to an Air Force museum located on the fringe of Eglin Airbase, the Air Force Armanent Museum. However, as my wife had gotten little to no sleep in her overnight traveling, she decided to go back to the van about two-thirds of the way through. I finished looking around and took her back to hotel for a nap.
All in all, we had a great day. Many people hear about my wide travels and say, "Wow; it must be fun to visit all those interesting places." or "Wow; it must be nice to dine out at such nice restaurants all the time." It is; the food is great and I see sights that are as varied as you can imagine...but I (almost) always do it alone. This time, I get to have the company of my beautiful bride. What more could a fella ask for?
Posted by lamontp at 2:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2005
Good News During a Long Trip
This evening, I purchased a plane ticket for my wife to fly out and join me on this long trip. This will be the first time that she has accompanied me on a business trip outside of Utah.
This week, I'm in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. Many have called me a brave man for flying to Florida this week. Well, Ft. Walton Beach is in the (more or less) far wester part of the panhandle, so I'm not anywhere near the Hurricanes flying around here.
The thing that is different about this trip is that for the first time, I will not be able to go home for the weekend. So, after a little bit of discussion, my wife and I decided to have her come and spend the second week with me in Florida. I already have the hotel room, I already have a rental car (which she can not drive, but she doesn't want to anyway) and I even have a food allowance. As long as we're smart about watching the food spending, all I have to provide is a plane ride to get her here and back home. Delta AirLines to the rescue.
One advantage of traveling as much as I do is that I have a lot of miles saved up. Heck, I have miles with 6 different airlines that can be used with about 40 airlines worldwide. We used miles to go on our vacation to Australia/New Zealand last December-January. Booking the tickets that way meant that we had to spend a few days in Japan and Guam as well. I only have to pay for the gate fees/taxes for each time we landed somewhere, which was 11 times over 5 weeks for that vacation.
For the ticket I booked tonight, I spent approximately US$70, because there's an extra US$50 charge for booking using miles less than 14 days in advance :(, plus 25,000 miles out of the over 100,000 I currently had. She will leave Friday evening and arrive Saturday morning.
I'm really looking forward to it.
Posted by lamontp at 6:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack