Saturday: Travel day

Which means that I took lots of pictures of things, but never had time to read the RSS stuff.  So no links, but lots of pictures.

I'm not sure if I've posted a picture of the bear I had when I was a kid, but this is him.  He now lives in the chair I had in undergrad and grad school.

I saw this guy at the airport.  He's pretty much Captain Meme.  Zelda hat, grumpy cat and Naruto plushies.  It seems a bit excessive for a plane trip.

 I pretty much just slept on the flight from IND to ORD.  All the seats on the plane seemed to be filled except the one next to me.  In any case, this layover also won the Best Gates Ever prize, as I arrived at B-19, and left from B-17.  People were already in line when I arrived, but we ended up having to wait an extra half hour to board.  The pilot told us once we were on that she'd changed the flight plan to avoid turbulence, and that's what caused the delay.

Since I didn't have any time to get food at ORD, I bought the excessively pricey roast beef sandwich.  Not terrible,  but not $10 worth of sandwich.

And Brazillian Coke?  How does that even happen?

 Vroom vroom jet jet.  A tablet full of old comic books, Doge 2048, and downloaded youtube videos is now my favorite way to travel.

The Big Island.

Summit of Haleakala.  Our telescopes are there somewhere.  I don't think the resolution is sufficient.

There's a wildfire in Makakilo

Pearl Harbor.

Story time:

At some point during this trip, my bag got caught by some sort of baggage monster, and the large external zipper pocket was basically destroyed.  The zipper was ripped away from the bag body, and the fabric at the end of the zipper was ripped as well.  I'd largely resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to buy a new bag, as fixing this one seemed like it wasn't going to be an easy thing.

The damaged bag.

 After picking it up from baggage claim today, I figured I'd go to the United baggage office, and see what I needed to do to fill out a damage claim.  I walked in, and seeing only an old guy fiddling with a pile of papers, I assumed I could just go up to the counter.

"You think you're next?" said the old man in the most stereotypical "Old Southern Jackass" accent you can imagine.

"What?" I said, not expecting a random crazy old dude.

"You show up now, thinking you can just walk up and do whatever you want, but that's not how it is, because I was here first, so you're just going to have to wait until I'm done, do you understand me?"

"Whatever," I replied, adding a muted, "asshole."

Turning his attention to the counter agent, he continued, "You should learn yourself to not mess with paperwork when there are customers to deal with!  That can wait until later!  You should be helping me with my problems!"

"Sir, I need to log in to the computer to access the information I'll need, this will only take a second," said the agent, stunned that somehow she'd entered a story with this asshole in a starring role.

"I don't care about that!  You lost my stroller, and told us to go out and wait for it, but it never showed up, so we came here, and it's still not here, and you better find it for us!"

"Just give me a moment to call the gate and see what the situation is there.  Sir!  Sir, that's not yours, sir, that's been here for three days!" the agent was forced to reply as the old guy wandered behind the counter to investigate the stroller that was clearly not his.  "Now, do you have your claim ticket so I can check on it?"

"No, because it's my son's!"

"I'm going to need that ticket, because I won't be able to find it otherwise."

"Well, that's just great, now I'll have to go talk to him and get it, and then you'll just waste more of my time!"  The crazy old jackass exits, however "foreign young dude" has heard him rambling, and insists that he's next.

"That's like my problem!  My wife is waiting at the gate for our stroller, and it wasn't there, and we need it!"

"Ok, I've already confirmed that there are no strollers there, so if it was on the flight, it will be here."

"Can you have someone find my wife?  She's waiting there, and I can't get back to the gate [since it's, you know, a security issue to have random people wandering back to the gate], so you have to let her know!"

"Can you call her?"

"No!  Her phone is off, and she has like ten bags!"

The baggage agent puts on the face of "you motherfuckers brought a kid, a stroller, and ten other fucking bags, as carry-on luggage, and you split up with no way to communicate?  You're fucking morons," but wisely says none of that, instead opting for "hopefully she'll come here anyway, as the stroller isn't going to show up there."

It is now my turn.  "Can you describe what you're missing?"

"Oh, no, I'm not missing anything, I was wondering how to make a damage claim.  This pocket on my bag is all ripped up, like it got caught on some machine or something."

"Huh, yeah, that looks like it got stuck in a belt.  That's what, like a 21-inch?"

"Sure?"

"Follow me," which was followed by, "wait, no, stop here" when we started going into the backrooms of Luggage-Town.  "How about this?"

What?

Yeah.  Apparently if your bag gets eaten by the luggage trolls, the standard procedure is to trade your ripped up bag for a brand new bag.  The new one is a bit smaller, but has four independent rolly wheels so you can send it skating across the floor.  Not a bad trade, although due to the crazy way I personify inanimate objects, I'm a bit sad to leave behind the bag that's traveled with me for more than a decade to four foreign countries on three continents.

This has nothing to do with anything, but I took the frames as I was flying into IND last week.  I just now stitched it into the gif since I was almost exclusively tablet computing.  The first three frames work well to show the parallax as we fly past, but the last five kind of fall apart.  I used horizon level fixed points, and that might have been part of the problem.