Leaving on a Jet Plane, Part II

Here are couple of more pictures :

The queen couldn't be interested less in aircraft, and wished us a bon voyage when we went out to the airport. Turns out she and Brittany were making brownies and pumpkin muffins while the guys were off doing 'guy stuff'.

I can't say who the pilot is or what he is doing here, but just put it this way : think of anyone famous you have ever heard of in the last 20 years, and he has probably been their pilot.

Yep. Him too. Uh huh. Him too. Yes, her many times. Them, too.

So we have been killing him with kindness at the Thai Inn, so he invited me out to give it a tour. If you think the outside is something, you should have seen the inside. Wish I could have taken pictures.

UPDATE : They are gone. What a beautiful, picture perfect take-off. Now I can post something that shows mere mortals are not cut out to pilot these things :

Piece of cake.

Don't forget : there are even more knobs, dials and switches above that didn't make it into the picture.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

More to come later, but this is what I got a tour of last night :

If you think the outside is incredible, you should see the inside.

Filmed in Panorama-vision

There is a panoramic picture of wet, drizzly Dillingham, Alaska taken from the impressive camera of my new iPhone 5. You cannot imagine how much I appreciate 50's and rain as opposed to the Iowa norm of 80s to 90s and 100% humidity without rain.

As the saying goes, you never have to pay for air conditioning as long as you live in Alaska. ;-)

I should mention that is Little Airport Road. It is called Little Airport Road for two reasons : it's not very big, and it used to be the airport runway for Dillingham back in the day. I wouldn't want to try it today, unless you had hella shock absorbers with about three feet of travel on the plane. Hell, I won't do more than 10 MPH on it in a car.

Pothole-O-Rama!

That brings up another thought. The Dillingham Police are really, really good at spotting drunk drivers. They have to be. They have had years of practice honing that skill by picking out the true drunks from the people swerving to avoid potholes in the road. After all, why fill potholes when nature is going to pack them with snow and ice in another month or so?