After passing some time at the airport in Frankfurt, our flight to Athens took off.  I felt a bit sorry for the chap in the aisle seat next to me.  He was about 6′ 5" and was hawkishly watching a seat in the bulkhead row that was empty until just before takeoff.  Unfortunately for him, the person sitting in that seat showed up, so he had to spend the flight folded up like a pretzel.  We were flying on Lufthansa and they served a nice breakfast of some buns, bacon, ham and cheese, which I gather is a fairly typical German breakfast snack.  After breakfast, I was watched the ground for a while and then woke up to discover that we were offshore of Athens.

There was an airport near the coast that I thought we’d land at, but it quickly became apparent that we weren’t landing there because 1) we were way too high turning from the downwind leg to base, and 2) we didn’t turn final.  Instead we continued inland and shortly thereafter landed.

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While passing through the Frankfurt airport I noticed that no one was smoking and thought this was a Good Thing.  That is, until I walked past a pair of small glass boxes, each about the size of a bus shelter, packed with people who were smoking.    If you look closely at the pictures, you’ll see that the guy with the bright blue jacket is actually propping the door open but the cigarette smoke wasn’t pouring out.  They must have been negatively pressurized because you really couldn’t smell the cigarette smoke, except from someone’s clothes when they walked by you as they exited.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like in there, but I’m certain that you probably didn’t need to be sucking on a lit cigarette to get your daily nicotine fix.

I wrote this Sunday morning starting at about 5am airplane time (GMT+1).

Flight 872 from Toronto to Frankfurt is waking up. The cabin lighting has been switched from the deep blue night mode to a happy pinkish hue. I’ve been watching the dawn approach for about half an hour when there was just a light bluish tinge to the horizon. It’s now been joined by a dark orange band below it.

People are starting to move about the cabin and a cart full of “breakfast bits” just passed heading towards the front of the plane.

I was able to doze for a while, but I’ve been fidgeting in my seat trying to stretch out my legs. The seats on Air Canada’s 777W are quite comfortable as far as airplane seats go, but after several hours of sitting in I want to get up and wander about. But I didn’t want to wake my two seatmates, so I’ve had to make do.

<insert breakfast here>

Once breakfast was served, I got up and wandered about for a while. It felt good to stand up after sitting for so long.

The rest of the flight was fairly uneventful and we arrived in Frankfurt on-time. Clearance through customs was painless and the only thing about clearing security was that I forgot about a bottle of water that showed up on the x-ray. But, that really wasn’t a problem because when the security guy mentioned it I went “d’oh!” and retrieved it for him to throw out.

To pass the time before the next flight, I headed off to gate A42 with my parents to do a virtual geocache. Basically, you had to have your picture taken near the sign.

I’ll write more about the flight from Frankfurt to Athens and the time spent in Athens a bit later.

The first of four fights today on the way to Athens, Greece, went off in the best way possible: uneventful.  We left on-time and landed at Toronto where it was raining on-schedule.  Most of the flight was above the clouds, so there wasn’t a lot to see.  I did take some pictures of some military aircraft at the apron at the Esso Avitat in Ottawa, which I’ll post then I have a better Internet connection.  (I’m using a public terminal near the gate with a horrible albeit functional keyboard.)

Our next flight is to Frankfurt on a Boeing 777W, one of the new aircraft in Air Canada’s fleet that has pods up in business/first class.  Sadly, I’m not travelling in podclass, though a friend who went to the Middle East in one says it’s the way to travel.  From Frankfurt we catch a flight to Athens after a couple of hours in the airport.  There’s a virtual geocache called RWY 42 (GCA33A), which I’m hoping to do.  Basically, you have to have your picture taken with the sign for gate A42, which is at the end of the wing that I think we’re going to be in.

I’ll try to post some pictures from Frankfurt if I can find a decent wifi connection.

Something happened on the second flight on my trip home from San Antonio via Newark a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been fuming about it ever since. I’ve decided to stop fuming and write what’s turned into a long entry about it.

Every flight in or out of the northeastern US was delayed that day because of the winds. My flight from San Antonio to Newark was almost 2.5 hours late departing because of these delays, so my 3-hour layover in Newark turned into a 6-minute layover. In the chaos to get off the plane and to my connecting flight, which was slightly delayed at this point, I forgot something under my seat. I ran through the airport and made it to my connecting flight to find that it was further delayed. Phew!

I caught my breath while I waited for them to call the flight, which they did a few minutes later.

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I’ve been reading a travel-related blog called Gadling lately.  Recently, one of the bloggers there recounted his experiences on a Southwest Airlines flight and ranted about the fact that he wasn’t served peanuts on the flight.  Apparently, Southwest Airlines opted to not serve peanuts because one of the other passengers was very allergic to peanuts.  The blogger was very skeptical that there are people with allergies that are so severe that they can’t even be in the vicinity of the allergen.

Unfortunately, there are.  And there’s an increasing number of people with nut allergies. 

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The SAS Global Forum 2008 that is.

I spent much of this morning in the Coders’ Corner sessions, which were short sessions with tips for programmers and users alike.  Ten minutes in length, I found these sessions quite useful.

I also attended another session on OLAP data cubes and one that discussed a factor analysis of a health care provider survey.  The latter was of interest to me because it used a technique that I’d like to use at work.

Papers from each of the streams were judged and the best were recognized during the closing ceremony.  I was unexpectedly asked to grade one of the sessions I was in this morning, which was kind of neat.

The closing ceremonies also had some pretty cool door prizes ranging from clothing donated by the various sponsors to a pair of airline travel vouchers to a pre-paid registration to SAS Global Forum 2009.  A ripple of "oohs" washed through the audience when they announced that prize.  Unfortunately, my name wasn’t drawn for that one or any of the other prizes.

After things wrapped up, I walked back to the hotel with a colleague who was staying here.  Along the way, we stopped to do a couple of geocaches before heading off to do our own things this afternoon.  I continued geocaching and ended up logging 5 caches in total today: 3 traditional caches, a virtual cache and a webcam cache.  My friend Rob helped out with the webcam cache by making a screen capture of me standing in front of a webcam that’s pointed at the Alamo.

I hopped in the pool for a few minutes upon my return to the hotel before I headed out to find somewhere to eat.  I ended up having dinner at Boudro’s on the Riverwalk where I was lucky and only had to wait about 5 minutes for a table.  Other people were being given wait times of an hour or more.  (It would have been worth waiting that long.)

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