Midwest/East coast trip, day 1

Day one of my East coast trip, the aluminum tube ride to ORD. Not much to report on this front other than on time service from United. That and I started reading The Testament by John Grisham, a book I'd recommend.

The interesting thing about today's trip, at least to me, was when I booked mytickets. My final destination was Indiana so I wound up searching for airfares from Sacramento to Indianapolis. I found a reasonable fare on United with good departure and arrival times. I was a mouse click away from buying the ticket when I remembered my airplane partner telling me I should fly into Chicago then taking the bus to Indiana as Chicago is much closer to my final destination than Indianapolis. I quickly looked up direct Sacramento-Chicago flights. Hey, look, there's a direct flight on United but whoa, the fare is $330 *more*...but wait, what's this? It's the same United flight from SMF-ORD that I'd take if I flew SMF-ORD-IND. I looked at things several times and sure enough, a direct SMF-ORD flight was $330 more than SMF-ORD-IND...for the same flight on the SMF-ORD leg.

Hmmm, so why exactly would I want to book a direct flight? :-) Hey, I know, I'll book the SMF-ORD-IND flight then take the bus from ORD. So that's what I did.

Thinking about it after I'd booked the flight, I decided to call United and ask if there was any penalty for not boarding the connecting flight. I get the standard "If you change your flight, there's a $150 surcharge plus airfare difference" answer to which I reply "But I don't need to change my flight and I don't care about loosing any value of the ORD-IND leg". The answer is then "Well, ok, there's no problem with that".

So that's what I did. I still have the unused ORD-IND boarding pass in my pocket.

After arriving in Indiana, my airplane partner and I took a trip to the airport in order to clean up the plane a bit. As the sun is setting, what looks like a Supercub on floats lands and taxis in. It turns out to be a brand new Top Cub from Cubcrafters and is being ferried to Canada as the first Canadian certified Top Cub on floats. It was a great looking airplane.


Hopefully I'll post more interesting aviation stuff in the next day or so. Actually, the first couple of posts will be delayed somewhat as I don't have internet access. Life without the internet...what a concept :-) No internet access explains why a couple of days worth of postings show up all at once. No, I'm really not compressing time.