Trip to Seattle

On Thursday afternoon (10/23) we sprinted from the UCLA parking lot at 3:52 pm to catch the Westwood Flyaway bus to LAX. We got there just as the last person was stepping on the bus, but as we tried to climb on the driver said she had space for only one! We offered to stand, but she said “No”. Fortunately, a passenger offered to hold his kid for the ride, and she was ok with that. It actually would have been ok to take the 4:30 bus as our official flight was at 6:30, but my hope was to catch an earlier flight.

At LAX we discovered that Alaska Airlines was the only airline operating out of the second half of terminal 3 so we made it through security in 5 minutes. The whole time we just kept asking were are we this can’t be LAX. In the terminal we looked at the screen quick and when Anja said gate 31B we were off. We got to 31B Alaska Airlines departing for Seattle at 4:50 pm and boarding had just ended and it was full anyway; Damn we missed it. Anja was starving so we went to Burger King and got some food but as I sat there something did not seem right that we had missed that flight so I went back to the terminals and low and behold there was an Alaska Airlines 5ish pm flight boarding and there was room so I ran back and grabbed Anja and we hopped on the flight and got the last row of the plane to ourselves.

In Seattle Justin picked us up and we headed to the Tap House in Downtown. Steve Schwieniman, a friend from Cal Poly, came down and meet us and he and I discussed current times and back in the day. Steve headed off to get home to his 3 month old daughter and we were about ready to leave when Papkin showed up. Anja and I had met Papkin in the northern jungle of Thailand in January 2007 and had gone caving with him. We caught up and headed home to Justin’s at about 11 pm.