Seattle January 10, 2012 - Tuesday

   Kate met me at Johns place around 8:30am and, after dropping my stuff off at her apartment, we walked down across the river to the old Gas Works Park, where Seattle’s old gas works plant operated from 1906 to 1956 before being shut down and later being turned into a park for the public in 1975. We followed up the adventure at the Gas Works by going to Starbucks for a bit before heading back to Kate’s apartment for a bit of lunch: multi-grain bread grilled cheese and tomato soup.  

   Around 3pm I got my things together and Allison was kind enough to drive me out to the Sea-Tac airport and saved me the hassle of having to take public transit through town with both my backpacks. After saying good bye to Kate, I found my way to the correct check-in location and got my bag ready for check-in, putting it into the travel bag I bought for it and tying it around with straps so that baggage handlers wouldn’t have to haul on the thin, ready-to-break-looking strap that was attached to the travel bag itself.  True to Murphy’s Law, as soon as my bag was weighed and stickered for the flight the baggage handler hauled it off by the only strap I didn’t want to be used and thrown onto the conveyor belt for its journey into the inner recesses of the airport before being loaded into the belly of the plane, hopefully headed to Heathrow airport in London.  Oh well, we’ll see if it’s still there when I pick it up, Lord willing in Heathrow.  

   The rest of the process of going through security went well, belt, shoes, coat off, through the metal detectors and full body scanners and then belt, shoes, coat back on. You’d think they’d be able to come up with another method of trying to liven the trip up.  Once through security I had to find my way to gate S10, only a short little train ride away at a different terminal which didn’t prove too hard to find in the end, and I arrived with still a good hour before my flight was scheduled to take off.  I found enough stuff to keep me occupied with the complementary free wireless internet that I discovered Sea-Tac provided to all outgoing passengers and spent my time on facebook and starting this blog post. 

   Boarding took place about 15 minutes before scheduled take off with the usual first class people getting to board first, and looking all smug in their luxury seats sipping drinks already when the rest of us finally get on board and start settling into our seats.  I was lucky enough to get into a section of three seats next to the windows, and only one of the seats was taken so; we’ve got a seat between us, me and the other guy, which is nice. 

   Ever since watching LOST, whenever I get settled into my seat on the plane, I check out all the people around me and wonder what kind of character they would end up being on a show like that, who would survive and who would be the weird ones that would make the show interesting, etc. should we crash on some deserted island and have to try to survive there for a while together. I definitely think I would be one of the survivors for no reason really. I just assume in anybody’s fantasy of crashing on a desert island somewhere, they’re not the ones who die otherwise it would be a lame story to begin with, unless you had quite a limited imagination, in which case you dying might be the only scenario which you can come up with. 

   Anyways, I would be one of the survivors, slightly injured perhaps during the crash, but nothing too serious, and there’s this one black steward on board who I think would make a good survivor and take charge of things a bit trying to get people organized.  He did a good job of getting this one older guy to get back into his seat after he tried to go to the washroom after the seatbelt sign had come on. There’s this other east Indian guy though who I’m pretty sure would probably die, or not last very long if he did survive the crash, might be the type to go kind of weird in the head and run off into the jungle or something after a couple of hours for no apparent reason. Proceeded to start cleaning his ears with a little bit of wood or something once he was satisfactorily seated in his chair.  There’s one other young lady, a mom with a little boy, who would have to survive too; you always need the one young mom with the little child who she worries over on the desert island. There was another lady a couple rows up from me all decked out in mountain hardware clothes, that I’m pretty sure would have a decent shot at surviving on a deserted island if she didn’t die in the initial plane crash.

   The meal that was served about an hour into the flight was actually pretty decent. The stewardess called it curry chicken, and I think she was pretty right about it, definitely tasted like chicken and the consistency of it helped prove that fact, though I don’t know how curry-like it was. It wasn’t too bad though, as airplane food goes.  Helped to have some ginger ale to wash it down with afterwards. Then it was time to buckle down for the long haul and the rest of the flight. I watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which wasn’t as entertaining as I thought it was going to be, definitely not enough action in it, and nearly fell asleep, but managed to finish it before dozing off for a couple of hours.  I guess I thought it was going to be more like a Bourne movie or something like that.