(I’m trying to keep these travelogue items light to avoid weighing down the blog to unreadability–I don’t want to “Bill-ify” it, to name the first but not only person to notice the phenomenon)

I got to Dad’s place at midnight, and got up at six for my flight. To get the best fare, my trip out to Seattle went to Las Vegas for its connection–go figure. America West was good, but not serving us a meal on either flight was a ripoff (two beverage services does not compensate). I guess fare wars have killed meals for most airlines.

Almost six hours later, we landed in the Las Vegas airport. It was strange, seeing nothing for miles, and then houses and a city in the middle of nowhere. In the airport, they really did have slot machines in the terminal, something I’d joked about the day before. I belatedly realized that my friend Fran lived right in town somewhere, but my layover was only forty minutes, so I just silently toasted him with my Diet Coke…

As we flew out of Las Vegas to Seattle, I saw brown desert and mountains as far as the horizon, broken only by small threads of long white road far apart.

After my flight to Seattle, I moved down to baggage claim. On my way down the escalator it gave a great lurch and crash, and pitched us all forward as it stopped dead. It never started up again. Bad omen? I don’t believe in them, but it was pretty weird.

On the bus into the city, we saw the cruise ship Star Princess at dock. I’ve never seen a ship that big. It looked like a twelve story high rise building turned on its side and floated in the water.

More tomorrow…