last day and trip home (bonus day!)

Sunday was our last day in Syracuse. Our flight left at 3:30 in the afternoon, so we pretty much had a full day to mess around. Lunch and coffee with Eiichi, we really had to drive around to find a place open on Sunday morning! That was kind of a surprise.

Now, some highlights from the return voyage:

• due to a canceled flight prior flight, we were selected to change travel arrangements. In the end it didn't mean much- we flew to JFK instead of Atlanta, and then nonstop to Portland.
• The Delta Connections pilot from SYR to JFK was kind of a "race car driver"- taking the corners (on the ground) kind of fast compared to other pilots, and accelerating out of the turn at take off. Not scary, just unusual.
• Departing from JFK we experienced some "congestion", there were quite a number of planes queued up to leave the terminal. So many in fact that we couldn't back up. While taxiing around the airport I could see about 6 planes in front of us at one point. Later the pilot announced that we were number eight in line for departure! In the end we were only 20 minutes late (the really flew to get us home) from our original landing time. This would have been over an hour from our earlier itinerary, except that plane was delayed too and arrived at the same time as we did!
• Our checked bag took the Atlanta route.
• When we landed in Portland it felt like 2 AM!
• We got in the car at about 6:30 AM pacific time, which felt like 9:30 AM, but we still only got about 5 hours of sleep.
• On I-84, we saw two interesting things: an entire box car (for rail) laying on its side on a flat bed truck; a pickup truck with the bed full of wagon wheels, some of them looking really old!
• It took us almost two days to get all the way home. Still, I find it utterly amazing: we flew across the entire country!

Forgot to mention above: we were upgraded to Business class (first class? we were in row 1) for the 6 hour flight from JFK to PDX. This got us dinner (good for a plane, I would say) and complimentary movies/games on the in flight monitors. I watched two movies which I'll sum up:

1. There will be blood: gruesome. It was very well composed, but due to the subject matter, I'm not sure I enjoyed it.
2. National Treasure 2: dumbest plot ever. I expected this. The first one was better, but it was okay- if your stuck on a plane for six hours.