So the plan for today was to go to kickboxing in the morning, then do the rest of my apartment set up shopping and hopefully get a good deal of the rest of my organizing finished. Instead, i did this:



See, this is what happened. Friday night, I met up with Andrei, a fellow momentum skier with whom i had been emailing for a couple of months. After a very enjoyable dinner, he told me that he and his friends were flying the next day and asked if i would be interested in joining them.

"That sounds like a lot of fun... but how much does something like that cost?" i ask.
"I have my own plane."

Oh. I did not know that.

So I say to myself... a free scenic plane ride in Seattle? Sounds good to me, free, as i like to say, is good.

This is Andrei, myself and his plane. His plane doesn't have a name, but as it turns out, it was born in 1949.



"So, do you have any parachutes?"
"It is much safer to fly without parachutes."

This statement, in retrospect, should have come as absolutely NO surprise, coming from a Russian. What he means though, is that it is much safer to attempt to land the plane than to jump from it. But, I digress.

Andrei, it turns out is quite a pilot, and it was a total blast to fly with him. He let me drive for a while (under protest) and was very diligent about communicating with the tower. He even lowered the windows a couple of times so that i could take some unobstructed photos of the mtns above the clouds:



In case you were wondering, no matter how tempting it might be, It is not a good idea to get close to an open window of a plane while aiming a camera. It might just might wind up needing one of those missing parachutes.

"Hey Andrei, uhmmm.. these windows, they don't stay closed very well."
"Don't worry about it. The parts of the airplane that are important work like they are supposed to."

Good to know.