Homeward Bound

2/5/2017

Soda Springs > Salt Lake City > Newark > Richmond

We rose at 6am, said goodbye to Cousin Debbie and her daughter Jackie and got on the road just before 7am. There had been a 50% chance of snow overnight with 1+ inches of accumulation, so we were very pleased to see that it didn't materialize and it was a balmy 38 degrees.

As we headed west for the first 40 minutes of the trip, the sun rose at our backs and illuminated the snow-covered mountains in front of us in spectacular fashion. The stunning scenery continued as we headed south to Salt Lake City, with the highway a thin ribbon weaving its way through the mountains that followed us along, immediately to our west and east. Alison took some pictures from the back seat, but they don't even come close to representing what we saw. Someone needs to invent a camera that matches our own field of vision. I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

7:56pm EST

We've arrived in Newark after a four hour flight from Salt Lake City and are waiting at the gate for the final leg to Richmond. The flight from Salt Lake was unpleasant and uneventful. Since we had booked these tickets at the last minute, each of us was assigned a middle seat in a different row.

To Alison's left was an oversized man in an undersized seat, coughing and hacking his way through the flight. To my left was a twenty something young man who waited until the last possible moment to put his iPhone into airplane mode. Once we were aloft, he immediately connected to the plane's WiFi (not a good invention) and proceeded to spend the next four hours texting with friends in uninterrupted fashion. As best I could tell from my occasional surreptitious glance, no single message was more than 3-4 words in length. "Hey. Yo. What's up? I'm flyin. Cool. Yeah. Wanna hang tonight? Sure. When? Late. Ok..." (and so on ad nauseum). The full sentence (let alone a grammatically correct one) is a dying art.

As I write this, we're waiting for a pilot. We've got a plane and a gate and all of the passengers, but the pilot is in the air somewhere between Toronto and here. Once he or she arrives, we will board and get underway.