From Farmington to First Class

6:34 AM Vegas Time 12/10/06
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I’ve finished my delicious breakfast. The attendant brought a little tray with a fancy napkin and real dishes. This was the best breakfast ever, even better than the one I ate in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In New Bedford I stayed at a hotel with all-you-can eat tator tots on the breakfast buffet. Luckily after pushing away from the buffet I was able to do a few laps in the pool to burn off all those tots.
This morning I ate cheesy eggs served alongside seasoned potato wedges while looking down at the Badlands of South Dakota. I find the strange, rolling landscape of the Badlands oddly beautiful, much like the alien hills of the Sonoran desert. I can’t imagine nearly anything as incredible as the experience of flying. There are lots of countries where people only dream of getting a chance to fly, and to be up here, eating a bagel served on a paper doily, I feel darn lucky.
This is the first time I’ve blogged on an airplane. My older laptop, Pillowtop Senior, is too bulky to fit beneath the seat of an airplane. He is so heavy requires his own wheelie bag. I can’t wheel his bag and my own wheelie bag with my clothes in it at the same time. So on previous trips I had to choose between bringing my clothes or my Pillowtop. Since I’ve never flown to a nudist colony before, the clothes have always won out.
Pillowtop Junior is small enough to fit into a normal laptop bag, with room to spare. You might have seen my previous post about the Medion computer at ALDI I was coveting. I was able to summon up my willpower to pass it by, even when I stopped in for milk and discovered they still had one left in the glass display case. I did buy a new 1 GB flash drive to store all of my pictures, but that was only $22 and not such a large purchase. I’m sticking with Pillowtop Junior for now.
The attendant warned the passengers not to stick their laptops into the seat back pocket my safety. Even with the wide first class seats, I don’t think I could stuff either Pillowtop into the seat back pocket. My seat back pocket is already filled with the in-flight magazine, the Sky Mall catalog and the paper barf bag. Usually I bring the barf bag home with me to use as a gift bag for the souvenirs I buy for family members. This is a tradition that my grandma started back when I was a little kid, and she brought me a barf bag as a souvenir from a Sun Country flight. She is fascinated with collecting all types of commercial airline accouterments, such as Northwest Airlines silverware, and TWA lavatory signs. I think Grandma loves flying even more than I do. She buys a new outfit and gets dressed up just to fly.
Right now I’m flying over the Rocky Mountains. We’ve passed by clouds, and the snowy peaks are blindingly bright in the sunshine below. The shadowed valleys look black in comparison. It is 52 degrees and sunny in Las Vegas right now. WE’ll be arriving shortly. I’m going to sign off to enjoy the view. Stay tuned for more posts as I blog live from Vegas.