Last night it dropped below freezing. I'm eager to head for some place warm, but checking the national weather map, it looks like some place slightly warmer is the best we can hope for unless we want to winter in Miami, or perhaps Mexico.
While Nancy packed up the last of Nicole's things to ship back to Anchorage, Nicole helped finish our Christmas cards. We ended up with four large boxes and one small one. We took them to Office Depot, intending to send them UPS, but when the first large box rang up at nearly $150, we decided USPS Parcel Post would do just fine. They will take a couple of weeks to arrive instead of a couple of days, but the total for all five did not come to $150.
We then drove to the post office and mailed all our Christmas cards. This has to be some kind of record for us. With each passing year, we seemed to procrastinated more, barely getting them mailed by Christmas a time or two.
About 4:00, we drove Nicole to the airport and dropped her off. When she cleared security and reached the gate, she called to let us know she had made it okay. She called again when she arrived in Anchorage, but I already knew she was there.
Shortly after she was in the air, I started following the flight on flightaware.com, a terrific tool and one I suspect most people use to track the arrival of incoming flights. You can watch all the air traffic in the US if you want or can enter a specific flight number and that one flight is all you see. It gives a map with the proposed route then shows the actual path and a small airplane that is pointed in the same direction as the real aircraft. It also shows altitude and speed, both proposed and actual. And all of it is virtually in real time. Truly amazing.
Her flight time was supposed to be 3 hours and 57 minutes but was actually 28 minutes longer. The reason was that they were flying almost directly into the jet stream which, at times, reduced their ground speed by over 100 mph and continually blew them off course, turning a 1,566 mile flight into a 1,625 mile one.
I kept checking her progress every few minutes, and now that the plane has finally landed, I'm exhausted. I feel like I made the flight myself.
Day 75
Vancouver, WA
Daily Mileage: 0
Total Mileage: 12,000
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