Bangkok or Bust!

I got an email yesterday telling me to get to the airport three hours before my flight. So I did. And then breezed through the TSA security checkpoint in 15 minutes (they confiscated my permethrin) and got to my gate with more than two and a half hours to spare. But wandering around an airport for a few hours dragging my carry-on bag is I suppose a fine way to get steps for an Actifit post that I may or may not post later today from Seoul before boarding the flight to Bangkok. Or actually tomorrow since I’ll be crossing the International Date Line.

For the Minneapolis to Seattle leg of the flight, I was one of only three passengers called up to the counter to have our passports checked; for everyone else it was a domestic flight.

I am by no means an experienced air passenger. In my entire life (recently had my 64th birthday) I’ve only made a dozen or so round-trip commercial flights and this is only my fourth trip outside of the United States. Twice to Europe as a kid and then 26 years ago to adopt my son in Colombia. So I’m old enough to remember people smoking on planes and when “the inflight movie” meant a movie on a pull-down screen that everyone watched together rather than everyone having a screen on the back of the seat ahead of them. In addition to everyone having smart phones and most having tablets or laptops.

For all the advances in electronics over those years, it seems that the quality of announcements has gone downhill. Just a few garbled and barely intelligible announcements from the pilot.

Like from a taut string between two paper cups. Do kids even do that anymore? Older forms of communication are fading away. I learned both Morse code and semaphore as a kid, I doubt that one kid in 10,000 does that now.

It’s strange to be writing these random thoughts while 34,000 feet above Idaho (thank you inflight infomatic!) that will be posted from Seattle during my short west coast layover before the long flight across the Pacific. (Wi-Fi seemed to connect fine but no data would upload or download).

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