Bounce

All we’re trying to do is fly to San Francisco to meet up with Mike’s son Matt then fly back east an hour or so to Salt Lake City and drive up to Park City for a few days of spring skiing. OK, it’s Friday the 13th, but nothing could go wrong. Right? Except that the car service driver thought I wanted him to come 15 minutes later than originally planned — I had said 15 minutes earlier, please — so he showed up at 6am instead of 5:30. Fortunately, everything turned out all right, what with no traffic and TSA Pre. Got to the gate at sunrise, right on time.

But wait. Plane has a problem. We’ll miss the SFO connection. Gate agent gets us a later connecting flight. But wait. They can’t fix our plane; need to await arrival of comparable equipment, in this case from Ireland. “Luck of the Irish!” says Mike.

We park in the United lounge and wait it out… five hours total.

At end of hour three they hand out the seven dollar food vouchers; almost enough for a cheese steak.

Good opportunity for working on final Baja blog post. Stay tuned…

When we finally board, I took my traditional window seat and then am joined by a somewhat large and chatty individual who I hope will honor the invisible wall arising from the center of our mutual armrest, but experience suggests it may not happen. And then we realize that due to the delay, at least of third of the passengers have been booked to other flights, leaving plenty of empty seats on ours. Large individual bolts for another row and all I’m left with is spacious space. Luck has changed!

Even though I’ve been flying for since I can remember, I still love looking out a window from 35,000 feet. Can’t get enough of it, honestly. But today — bad luck — it’s nothing but a grey haze as we jet westward.

However, this plane has individual video screens, so maybe I’ll shell out for a movie. But as luck would have it, everything is showing for free today! I immediately launch into “Nightcrawler”, an amazing flick about ambulance-chasing photojournalists starring an amazingly creepy but hilarious Jake Gyllenhaal.

Two hours later as the movie winds down I observe that the skies have cleared and we’re following the North Platte River over Nebraska.

Next up I pick “The Imitation Game”, and though the first hour is a bit ponderous, it concludes in a heart-wrenching flourish of emotions and triumphs.

Partway though I note that the Colorado Rockies are absolutely teeming with the white stuff.

Until we reach the Colorado Plateau with its jaw-dropping canyons and deserty peaks.

Then Kira Knightly shows up and adds her charms and guile to the movie, which deals with breaking the Germans’ military codes in World War II, spectrum disorders, and mid-20th-century morality laws. Lucky for the Allies that these two were so smart… and so good looking.

Movie ends as we fly over a huge solar facility, presumably in Nevada. The array of mirrors focuses sunlight on the top of the center tower, heating water for countless leprechauns who live in vast underground caverns beneath the array. Lucky for them!

Then we’re past the desert and the Sierra Nevadas and over banks of coastal fog, welcoming us with a mile-high rainbow at the end of which, presumably, are more leprechauns and possibly vast amounts of gold.

Onscreen nav system suggests we may be heading to Shangri La, but before you know it we’re on the ground…

…toasting the day’s mixed blessings and hoping the flight to Salt Lake is uneventful…

…as a plane filled with lucky Irish leprechauns rolls by.

From there on, it’s pretty much good luck as the sun sets on the City by the Bay…

…with its spectacular Pot o’ Golden Gate Bridge.

Late at night we’re in Salt Lake City where our luck holds up: the rental agency is out of sedans, so they put us in a very sexy minivan, with ample room for our travel party, all of our gear, and a half dozen lucky leprechauns.