Climate shock--Fairbanks Alaska to Washington DC in one day
A fairly warm early September day in Fairbanks, high sixties on Saturday, and promising to get near there again on Sunday (after having snowed in Denali the week before). Our plane left Fairbanks at 6:30 AM on Sunday, so it was nowhere near warming up to the day's highs yet. We got to wave goodbye to Denali, in a pink dawn nightgown, one more time as the plane headed south toward Seattle.
We changed planes in Seattle, had a small lunch with some new friends-for-life we had made on the trip. They were flying on to Newark from a completely different terminal, so we parted ways at Sea-Tac and took a train to our terminal to catch the plane to Washington National airport (DCA). DCA was formerly only for short haul to medium haul flights, but the jazzed-up 737s of Alaska Airlines can easily make the transcontinental flight and land comfortably on DCA's runways. I discovered a new brand of Seattle coffee (named Dilletante) that mixes in hot dark chocolate. It was so amazingly good that I was thinking of getting the next day's flight instead, but talked myself out of it. Or maybe my wife did, I forget. Alaska Airlines calls DCA by its original name, Washington National Airport, not the Republican-imposed name of Reagan National Airport, so I was already liking them. Good thing, too. We were nearly 8 hours in the air with them yesterday.
When we stepped outside of the terminal in DC, we were hit by a blast of the Washington late summer hot, humid air. As in, "whoosh!" As a kid, I grew up here, so it's by no means foreign to me, but after 2 weeks in Alaska's pristine air, it was still a shock. Oh well. Back to the real world.
Picture-heavy trip post when I get around to it!
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