jay | Back home

Yesterday afternoon I began the five remaining flights needed to get home from Resolute, saw old friends and met an LJ friend :).

At the Resolute check-in counter for Kenn Borek Air, I was paged -- Pascal was calling me from 20km out of camp back on Devon, using his Iridium phone, to ask me questions about the gravity meter (I left it with him on the promise of a few more data points). A bit surreal... Then we boarded this Beech KingAir for a 2.5 hour cramped flight to Cambridge Bay:

One of the seats fell apart during boarding, so the first officer had to rearrange the bags to open up a usable seat. There were only seven passengers...

Later, I caught another convertible 737 from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife, got out and went through security (far northern airports don't screen passengers) and then got back in the same airplane to fly on to Edmonton. I sat next to the pilot of the earlier KingAir -- he was on his way home to Calgary after a 3-week tour. We talked about flying in darkness and -50C temperatures, air traffic, and NASA topics...

I owe great thanks to

handslive and

purplejavatroll for meeting me at the airport -- their third run on my behalf! After check-in we all went to Off-Whyte for mangosteens on the porch, and I watched the sun set with friends, pizza and

therealjae's German wines. Mmmm...

And... I met

boubabe! Who is stunningly beautiful, soft-spoken, witty, and seemingly a bit shy (although jetlag may have contributed). And somehow taller than I'd visualized ;-).

It was a lovely evening, a welcome back to twilight. Thanks.

This morning I merely worked on a proposal from my hotel room, airport shuttle, made the obligatory duty-free visit (500g Nestle Swiss chocolate is on sale for C$4.50/bar...) and left Edmonton and its surrounding glowy-yellow canola fields...

connecting uneventfully in Seattle, after spectacular mountain and glacier views:

Mmmm... I want to go there sometime. Maybe I can visit and talk folks there into a camping trip...

I couldn't fit my NASA flight jacket into my luggage... normally I only wear it in the field. In Canada, the flag and patches made it obvious that I was visiting from the US, but I figured I was doing the locals a favor by being a magnet for any local terrorists ;-). Wearing it back into the US, I was apprehensive... here, I've avoided wearing anything with a national affiliation since March, since it could be construed as a political endorsement of the war on Iraq. Having little choice with the jacket en route, I simply smiled and avoided making eye contact once I was back on US soil.

And on to San Francisco this afternoon, to the welcome of

patgreene and the kids (grin). They were noisy!