Rowing in St. Catherines Day 1

As mentioned in my last entry, I've been on vacation for the last week. I feel a *little* guilty for not running, but I'm watching my food intake (as much as one can on a vacation), and I have not been completely sedentary...

I'm going to go back and reconstruct some of my vacation here - for posterity. These aren't running related entries, but so what!

We left last Sunday, August 3rd from LAX. My daughter was going to France for a few weeks and flew out of LAX, so it was a convenient trip for my wife to drop everyone off at once. We left the house at 3 AM and got to the airport at 4. Lines weren't too long yet, and we made our way through check in and security in a reasonable amount of time. One of the great things that United Airlines has done at LAX is to have a person with a microphone guiding people to the next available kiosk. Also, being a Mileage Plus Premiere level helped as we were able to bypass the security line. I got my daughter to her gate a little before 5AM (yeah - Starbucks was not open yet), and the boys and I went over to the Red Carpet club, where we had to wait 30 minutes for the club to open. Our flight was not scheduled until 9AM, so we had some time to kill in the club. The boys settled down for a little nap.

Our end goal for the day was Buffalo NY, right across the border from Niagara Falls Canada. We had to fly through Philadelphia, so we settled in for a lengthy flight on the small plane. As a frequent flier, I am used to the little glitches that can hammer plans, and this day was no different. As I was trying to resolve a seat problem with my son (I had asked us to be seated together in Economy Plus), the agent notified me that the plane to Philly was bein delayed due to mechanical problems! So, I got the seating changed and settled in for what I feared was going to be a long delay. To my amazement, the problem was fixed and we were still able to board on time! We got off about 30 minutes late, and were on our way across the country.

Once in PHL, we had to change carriers to USAir to make the quick flight to Buffalo. It's been a long time since I've flown an airline other than United or Southwest. I was absolutely flabbergasted to find that you had to pay for drinks on USAir! Let me mark in my book that I want to avoid that airline!

The rest of our flight was uneventful - we picked up our car in Buffalo and drove across the border to our hotel - the Courtyard in Niagara Falls. We were comfortably in our room by 11PM Eastern. In total, we spent 17 hours in transit to get to our destination - hmm.... we could be in Frankfurt by now!