Flight Part I

 It Begins

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.  You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."  - Tolkien

We took the BelAir Airporter from Ellensburg over the mountain to SeaTac.  It was comfortable and the boys read and drew on the trip over.  

The Snoqualmie pass is beautiful in the summer, and it was a wonderful way to say goodbye to Washington.  We got through security relatively easily and ate a wholly underwhelming meal at SeaTac, which is desperately in need of more robust and higher quality food options.

We flew Finnair.  During the summers there is a direct flight from Seattle to Helsinki.  Starting in September you have to connect through another U.S. city with a layover.  (Last year we flew through L.A.).  The flight time is just about ten hours and you fly over – or at least very close to – the North Pole.  

Boarding went smoothly.  Our airplane was an Airbus A350 and was very comfortable.  It felt like it had more legroom than most other planes we have been on.

Milo and Oscar are seasoned travelers at this point and did very well.  Our plane had seatback television screens, which the boys enjoyed watching for a couple of hours.  Amy had also packed lots of fun activities for them.  

And it was a long enough flight that they slept for about half of it.

They served two meals.  After we took off there was Kung Pao Chicken.  Which was surprisingly good for airplane food.  

Dinner came with a complimentary alcoholic drink.  Beer and wine were both available.  As were Finnish cocktails. 

Last trip I had a Long Drink, which is Finland’s most famous cocktail, mass produced in preparation for the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.  In essence it is a combination of grapefruit soda and gin.  It is a bit heavy on the soda, and mostly tastes like a Squirt that will eventually get you drunk.  They make other flavors as well.  This time around I had a Northern Blush, which was a sort of lingonberry gin fizz.  It was good.  Amy had wine.

Another cool thing about the plane is that it has externally mounted cameras on both the top and the bottom of the plane, and you can watch them any time.  They are super fun during takeoffs and landings, but also at anytime.  Especially at night.  The flight gets higher than most we’ve been on – at one point we reached almost 45,000 feet, and you could see the whole curvature of the earth.  

In the dark, it looked like we were at the top of the world – like we were astronauts.  In my best manspaliny voice I told the kids “actually, we’re not very far away from being in space right now.”  I looked it up later.  It turns out that we were very, very, VERY far from being anywhere close to space.

With dinner and drink services over, and with our airspeed and the rapid change of timezones making time an even more relevant concept than usual, the plane has a set time designated for sleep when they make the cabin extra dark.  Before they do that though they project a light show on the ceiling that is meant to imitate the Northern Lights – one of the top reasons that people come to Finland. I took a video of it: 

It was a perfect end to the evening, and provides a perfect stopping point for this blog post.

Hei Hei!