Long Distance Safety Briefing

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So today we move just that little bit closer to Emma - a flight to Calgary with a stopover in Seattle. It’s a boring and uneventful day, with nothing of real interest to report - the flights were even on time; so instead, some observations to pad out the entry.

It seems that our beloved carrier, Alaska Airlines, has developed a novel way of boarding its passengers. It gets the people sitting closest to the front to board first. Yep. Of course they then all take their time standing in the aisle getting organised, so when they let the people like us sitting up the back on, we can’t get past, which just holds up the whole process. I can’t think of any logical reason for them doing this, unless of course they were at risk of leaving early and wanted to soak up some time. I’ve always been a fan of the progressives from little old New Zealand. They board the people next to the windows first, which seems like a very good way of doing it. I’ve never seen anyone else do that.

The airline repeats the “last and final call” for the flight. If there’s a difference between “last” and “final” it’s escaping me for now (I did warn you that it was a boring and uneventful day).

Our flight from Maui doesn’t look all that full, and there’s an empty aisle seat next to us. Yay! Oh wait, there’s a very large women who‘s boarded very late waddling down the aisle towards us. But there are lots of empty seats, surely she won’t be in this one. But no such luck. Hmmm. I feel myself getting squeezed up against Issy as large lady plonks herself down.

I realise as we arrive in Seattle that it’s a place I know virtually nothing about. There’s snow on the mountains as we come in, so I’m pretty sure we’re not in Maui anymore. I‘d thought that it wasn’t that big, but if this is true its airport must have one departure gate for each resident. We’re at gate C2F, and they go all the way up to S. I count close to 200 flights on the departure board, some to places I’ve never heard of. Most airports I’ve been to list these by departure time, but if they did that here you’d never find your gate, miss your flight, and spend the rest of your life wandering around the terminal lost (now that I think of it there did seem to be quite a few people here wandering around looking a bit disoriented). Fortunately someone’s twigged to this issue and the flights are listed by alphabetical order of destination.

Issy points to a picture of a man on the tail fin of one of the Alaska Airlines planes, and asks me if I think that Alaskans look like Polynesians. I thought it was a picture of Bob Marley so I‘m not sure I’m going to be able to add too much to that particular discussion.

OK so the plane to Calgary’s not a 747, but there are still 100 or so passengers on board, so it comes as a bit of a surprise to find that they’ve only got one flight attendant doing the safety briefing for the whole plane. There’s a dogleg in the aisle between first class and us peasants, so if she stands right up the front we won’t be able to see her. She gets around this by standing at the dogleg, but even now you’d need a telescope to be able to see her if you were sitting right up the back. Perhaps even more worrying is that she’s now standing behind the people in first class, so they can’t see anything at all of what she’s trying to show them. None of them seem too concerned, and now that I think of it I suspect a lot of people who travel in first class probably think that safety briefings are a bit beneath them.

We’re in Canada! We manage to organise a four way teleconference with our offspring, who are currently spread to the four corners of the globe - Emma’s in Lethbridge a couple hours south of here, Troy’s on holiday in Berlin, we’re in Calgary, and Scott’s back home in Melbourne. We’d been a bit worried about Scott being at home on his own in the cold and gloom, but it seems Issy’s mum’s been keeping a close eye on him; he tells us that she rang him the other night and asked him if he was remembering to eat….

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