After a ten week stay at home, I’m back on the road this week. I went through Saskatoon again today on my way to Prince Albert. Tomorrow it is on to Pinehouse Lake for a meeting with our Public Works project manager at our new site. Not looking forward to the black flies and mosquitos. The challenge will be finding the trees that I marked back in December.
I was down in State College, Pennsylvania this week for work. University Park is an unincorporated community that sits within the borough of State College. Most of Penn State University is in University Park.
We have a monitoring site at Penn State University. I’m suppose to go down twice a year to inspect the site, but usually my schedule only allows for one trip. The site itself is about 7 miles out of town on Pennsylvania Game Commision land. A couple of miles from the site is a shooting range, I drove by it this time, and it’s just bizarre seeing this shooting range with targets set up and people firing their handguns.
State College is the main campus for Penn State. Beaver Stadium is home to the Big Ten Conference Nittany Lions.
This was my ride down. With the government logos on the side of the car and my government passport, it makes for easier border crossings.
But it doesn’t make the lines any shorter.
I spent the first week of the Olympics in Stephenville Newfoundland. It was bad enough trying to stay awake in Mississauga with the 3 hour time difference, try the 4.5 hour difference. Suprisingly, the winter out there has been similar to ours, a little bit more snow, but not as much as usual.
I was scheduled to be back early Friday morning, things were going to plan, settled into my priority seat. There were electrical problems with the system, so they tried the Airbus equivalent of the Ctrl-Alt-Del. After a few attempts, they announced the flight was cancelled. When they cancel a flight due to plane problems in Toronto, they just shuffle things around and voila, a new plane, you’re good to go. In Deer Lake, when they cancel a direct flight back to Toronto on an Airbus 319, you’re pretty much screwed as there are no other planes.
Eventually they re-booked us on a 12:15 pm flight to Toronto, not bad, only about six hours to wait. Through the morning, things got worse, 12:15 turned into 13:00, than 14:00, then 14:45 and finally 15:15.
There was some consolation when they announced over the PA that the plane had left Montreal. The ground technician covering up the engines, as they were expecting some weather to pass through.
It was almost 12 hours later than my original arrival time, but it was good to be home. A lot of people on the flight were going to destinations beyond Toronto, so they were scrambling to rebook their connecting flights. Many were going to the Olympics and down south. When the second plane arrived, it was starting to look like Pearson.
