Portland

If you were wondering why I didn't blog yesterday it's because my wife and I flew to Portland. We've found it easier than paying for parking to rent a limousine to the airport from where we live and have a driver take it. Interestingly enough, doing this is even cheaper than renting a car to drive to the airport from where we live (at least according to my wife.

Then we get to the airport and notice at our gate there is no plane and then still there is no plane at boarding time or 1/2 hour after we are supposed to take off so many other passengers on our flight were pretty upset about this. We have traveled enough to sort of take this kind of thing in stride but still it wasn't that fun watching the rain come down outside and it was raining from the SF Bay area to Seattle yesterday and snowing in the Sierras and Cascades. Finally, about an hour after we were supposed to take up someone brought this plane from storage because Air Traffic control wouldn't let it get to our gate because too many planes were taking off and landing for Christmas. Then the pilot and crew all apologized to us for taking off 1 hour after we were supposed to and the pilot told us that he would make up a lot of time by flying faster. If you fly higher you can fly faster I guess even if it is bumpy which it was at times. Everyone kept their seat belts on the whole flight unless they were going to the rest rooms on board because of the bumpiness. I had a window seat and as far as I could see in all directions it was clouds below us the whole trip. However, once we got into Oregon I could see snow on mountains above about 4000 foot elevation but it looked wet in all the forests below that altitude too. But, mostly all we could see was clouds from the huge rain storm as far as we could see. But, it was very beautiful and reminded me of the movie "The Aeronauts" which takes place in the mid 1860s in England and the male character actually did what they show in the story as a meteorologist and English Scientist and went up to I think 37,000 feet in a balloon then. So, we were likely flying at the same height as "The Aeronauts"(2019) did.

We got to Portland and found out that not all rental car companies have cars right there at the airport so we changed rental car companies because we had too much luggage to haul that far off site and rented an All wheel drive vehicle in case we had to deal with wet roads and snow with a lot of ground clearance for any situations we might run into while visiting 2 of our children for Christmas. One of them is married with a family and one is younger with a room mate here in Portland. And we have one more in Europe which we will see in February 2020.

So, Merry Christmas! everyone and Happy Holidays!