My flight is boarding now. You can follow my trip across the pond courtesy of FlightAware. Don’t be alarmed if the tracking stops just past Greenland. That’s as far as the FAA tracks flights.

Right now the previous flight 174 is showing up. I suspect mine will be wheels-up by 7:10 PM.

So long!

I’m traveling again this week – this time to the Netherlands. It will be my first trip to the Netherlands and I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be conducting two days of training in Rotterdam. I head over Monday evening, have Tuesday to get acclimated, do the set up Wednesday, train on Thursday and Friday, and travel back Saturday.

Look for some interesting posts during the next few days.

I got back from Pittsburg Thursday evening. It was a wasted trip, as for whatever reason the client had a conflicting meeting and didn’t see us. I wasn’t thrilled in the first place about making a trip when a simple online conference would do the trick. Looks like I was right to be skeptical.

I got back to the airport in time to catch an earlier flight to Philadelphia, though only by luck. I had to fly standby and hope I could do the same for the last leg back to RDU. It turns out the plane from Philly to RDU was oversold, thus most of Thursday was spent in Airport Terminal Hell waiting for my original flight.

Travel is tough enough when things go as planned. When they don’t its twice as bad. I wasted a huge chunk of the company’s money, not to mention a huge amount of my time away from work and the family. Idiotic.

I mentioned that almost eight inches of rain fell on Raleigh yesterday due to Tropical Storm Alberto. This morning I get the results of my home weather station:

Rain Rate: 0.00 in/h Yesterday: 7.24 in Total:19.41 in since 1/ 3 14:40
Barometer: Steady at 29.74 in 30.05 in sea; 12-24hr forecast: Sunny

See that? We got 7.24 inches of rain in 24 hours. Unbelievable.

I’m in Pittsburgh tonight for an early business meeting. It was a much longer trip than expected. My flight took me through Philadelphia and was on schedule, despite the bumpy ride that Tropical Storm Alberto supplied. My initial connecting flight wasn’t scheduled to leave Philadelphia until late so I did a little surfing at RDU airport before my flight took off. Thanks to my work I was able to discover a flight leaving a mere twenty minutes after my flight arrived. It was a close window but perhaps I could make it and save hours of travel.

I disembarked from the plane only to see the connecting jet at the gate all cranked up and ready to depart. Fortunately, a few minutes of observation showed the plane was just arriving! I had time to go through airport security again before checking in at the earlier flight. With a ticket in hand, I was thinking I was pretty slick.

Except I wasn’t. The plane was halfway to the runway when we heard the pilot cut the engines. A ground stop had been initiated “due to the weather,” we were told, and we weren’t going anywhere. A few fits and starts here and there had us wondering if we’d soon be airborne but it was not to be. The 50 minute flight turned into a 2:30 minute flight. At least it wasn’t just us: there were fifty or so planes surrounding us on the tarmac, each just as screwed as we were.

Air travel. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

We got a serious soaking today from the remnants of Alberto. Its been years since I’ve seen the type of flooding we had today. WRAL-TV claims almost eight inches of rain fell today. Insane.

It showed, too. The old building in the Waters Edge office park in West Raleigh was in danger of flooding, just like it was way back when. Southbound Capital Boulevard was brought to a standstill midday today as a lake developed at the U-Haul place near Brentwood road. Three lanes were reduced to one as floodwaters were up to the guardrail. The Cheviot Hills Golf Course had an especially large water hazard eat the front nine near Capital Boulevard. I couldn’t resist snapping a few pics of both of these flood events.

Late last summer I was really concerned about the drought, considering it to be the biggest issue facing the city. I was feeling pessamistic, thinking we’d be parched by now with no end in sight. Instead, Alberto has put us in the black in one fell swoop! Man, am I glad to have been so wrong!

Now let’s give the rain thing a break long enough to celebrate the upcoming Hurricanes Stanley Cup victory!