We are here (finely)

We are here! Augh! What a trip, I think I was in transit over forty hours from home. Due to the weather in Seattle I arrived at SeaTac airport five hours prior to flight time. I caught an early shuttle planning on the roads being a lot worse than the turned out to be, none the less I’m glad I arrived early, because the roads did get worse after I arrived. The Plane boarded slightly behind schedule. Looking out the window of the aircraft we noticed a slight issue, there was over six inches of snow covering the plane. Fortunately the flight crew also noticed, unfortunately it appeared the good folks at SeaTac didn’t appear to have a whole lot of experience with deicing well a little over three and a half hours later we were headed down the runway. A new feature our plane had was a camera mounted on the nose gear with the images displayed on the TV screens so the passengers can see what they are about to hit. Well as we accelerated down the runway, either the person that had painted the stripe down the center of the runway was drunk and painted the line to resemble an “S” turns ahead warning sign, or we were blown allover the runway as we took off. It felt like the latter. Once in the air there was still a lot of “liquid” on the outside of the windows. I kept thinking, doesn’t that add drag? Well they must have known what they were doing, because the plane did continue to climb and we were on our way. We flew “China Airways” one thing our booking agent failed to take into account, was the fact that I’m over 6’3”. Normally I’m quite happy with my height, but China Airways spaces there seats for the average Chinese person, so that with sitting on the tarmac for nearly four hours and an a almost fourteen hour flight to Taipei (18 hours on one plane) ough! We also had a 200 mile per hour head wind most of the way that added a little time to our journey. We were scheduled to have a hour and a half between flights in Taipei. Well getting in over five hours late guess what? They didn’t hold the plane just for us in fact there were 34 people on the plane that were planning on getting on the Phnom Penh flight. China Airway’s was really very exceptional about getting us on a flight to Bangkok (another three and a half hour flight in small seats) and then another flight to Phnom Penh, and only eleven hours late to our destination. At SeaTac we did meet up with the guys from NWMT’s that had flown out of Portland. So we had a group of ten that flew out of Seattle total. The five guys from NWMT’s decided to take advantage of our stop in Bangkok and spend a day there and will fly into Cambodia tomorrow. Sos was waiting for us at the Airport with a van and even had a nice hotel lined up for us. So after forty some hours I could finely stretch out and fall asleep, and at 23:00 Cambodian time. Well with the 16 hour time change I am up at 04:00 typing out this blog. I’ll write more tonight, I think we are going to go out to visit some villages today and see some of the drinking wells our group paid to have put in two years ago. We are planning on paying for a few more this year. Oh and but the way it is going to be near 100 degrees here today.

Andy