Back home after the short detour to Kiev on the way. The weekend in Kiev was basically spent sleeping, 14 hours after arrival and more after a couple of hours in the city..
Urgh.. Coma. Brainnssss... Arrived to our Helsinki office, visited a customer and bought a new phone to replace the stolen one. Now just hanging around here for a couple of hours.
Urhh.. The 757 really is not suitable for long haul flights. Especially with three people on a three-seat row, decent with two. Luckily the flight was fast, we departed an hour late and still arrived ahead of schedule with less than seven hours of flight time.
Newark airport now, one hour before our flight towards Europe departs. The flight should be relatively painless and short, just seven hours to Stockholm and one hour more to Helsinki. Although I decided to continue the journey a bit more, so it's working day in our Helsinki office first after arrival and then some more flights for the weekend.. Back in Turku on Sunday evening.
Damn it was cold in NYC today.. A couple of minus degrees and we were freezing in our light clothing. Did not have to walk out that much though, just to get some lunch and grab a shuttle bus to the airport.
Flying around Saint Croix, the first solo flight in US airspace. Slightly uncertain sounding radio communications and nice landing weather:
One more flight and we are now in New York. Damn it's cold in here.. The day was spent freezing and walking around the rainy city, shopping for some souveniers.
Tomorrow towards Europe, unless the currently raging winter storm prevents our departure. There has been a lot of flight cancellations today elsewhere and the storm should hit this area at night.
This was one of those days or evenings when almost nothing goes smoothly. As our apartment was not available for the last day we stayed the night in a hotel. In the morning we checked out the hotel and drove close to the airport, trying an Ihop chain restauraunt for breakfast. Excellent omelettes, good pancakes and good coffee which is rare around here.
It started to rain heavily, so we had to skip our plans about outdoor activities and figure out something that could be done inside. Cruzan rum distillery offers tours the factory, and visit to a rum distillery sounded like a good thing to do while in the Caribbean. The tour was relatively quick, but at least we got an idea how the rum distilling process looks like. Some souvenier bottles were also bought. :)
After the tour we visited Fredrikstad briefly, taking a couple of the pictures of the pier under which we were night diving yesterday. The NOAA ship on the pier made our dive yesterday a bit short, as they don't like people diving under their ship and we had to turn around a bit before the end of the pier.
We arrived to airport an hour before the flight, which we though would be enough.. Well, it wasn't as we were the last ones and the small Cessna 402 aircraft of Cape Air had full load of big guys with checked-in luggage. Due to the weight limits of the aircraft Mia's and Timo's bags got left out. The airline managed to get the bags flown to San Juan via Saint Thomas an hour later though. It still caused some extra concern, as our flight to New York will depart early tomorrow morning. I got to fly on the co-pilot seat again by the way, after asking the pilot. :)
The next surprise came when we finally got out of the airport. Timo had booked us a place in a small guesthouse next to the airport. Unfortunately it was technically in the next city even if just a few kilometers away from the airport, and taxis had fixed price of $50 to drive there. No way we would be paying that for that short taxi ride, so off to National car rental desk we went and rented a Hyundai for about the same price. Finding the three-room guesthouse and getting the keys to the room was a whole another story, but we did get them after an hour of phone calls and driving around.
After settling in Me and Timo went out to find some food and had some extra difficulties for example with Burger King closing a minute too early for us. Blaeh. Tomorrow goes more smoothly, I hope..
Today we continued the same activities as yesterday, this time in the correct order: flying first, then diving. Me and Mia went to the airport in the morning and took a half an hour flight around the island with the Diamond DA20. This was officially my first solo flight in the US airspace then. Heavy rain on landing caused some extra challenge, but the flight went well anyway and was fun. :)
After the flight we did a one tank dive to Cane Bay, which was relatively uninteresting. Way more interesting was the later dive off the Fredrikstad Pier after the sunset. It was a night dive again and we saw dozens of different animals: octopus, eels, crabs, shrimps, a sleeping turtle.. And even a seahorse. Unfortunately I did not have a camera with me on the night dive. :(
Today me and Mia started the day with two dives, Timo decided to skip diving for today. They were pretty basic reef dives with Sweet Bottom Dive Center, not much to say about them. Nice corals, but not that much other lifeforms. We did see a shark, though.
I had been emailing earlier with a local company Bohlke International Airways who have Diamond aircraft on the island, and scheduled an area familiarization flight with them today. I just forgot that combining diving and flying isn't exactly a great idea.. Well, a lot of calculation and I decided that the surface interval in between would be enough flying would be ok. Obviously it was, did not get any symptomps during the flight.
We had a good hour of flying around the island and some practice landings with their flight instuctor Lindsey, who signed me off to freely rent their aircraft in the future and showed me the navigation landmarks of the area. Got compliments of beautiful flying too. :)
This was also my first flight with the smaller brother of our Diamond DA40 aircraft, the DA20 Katana. It seems to handle pretty much the same way as the DA40, although as a smaller and lighter aircraft it is a bit more sensitive to the controls. Fun aircraft to fly anyway and the weather was totally perfect with calm wind.
US Vice President Joe Biden had been on the island too, and he was leaving today so we had to postpone the flight a bit due to flight restrictions in effect. There were a couple of Air Force C-17 cargo planes on the aircraft and they were just leaving at the same time when we were flying around.
Walked around the city a bit. And Timo found himself a bar with excellent local rum.. :)
