When we lived in Washington, DC I always planned my flights based on the combination of what time of day the Metro began running and how late I was willing to arrive at my destination city. Now things have changed a bit. In addition to making sure we can get transportation/parking at the right times, we now keep track of the weather to make sure we won’t be rowing in from the boat in a high wind or rainy weather. It all plays in. The weather info, being more-or-less last minute only works for us if we’re on flexible tickets or else we row in “early” like say–11 pm the night before a morning flight just to keep out of the rainy 3:30 am weather.

Since our schedule is much more flexible than it used to be, we often fly using Southwest Airlines buddy passes. These are free, space available passes that we can obtain via my brother, Brad, or David’s brother-in-law, Rusty, who both work for Southwest Airlines. My brother has worked there since the mid-1980’s but I never had the time to actually fly “space-a” because I was always in a hurry! Now that I can afford the time to slide back the schedule a bit, I’m finding that I’m able to actually use those wonderful and free passes from time-to-time.

We flew to DC in January using the passes and we’ll do so again next week. While I check the flights to see how full they are, I note that often the empty flights are the ones that leave early, early in the morning–like say 6:30 am. That’s great on the other end, arriving at BWI airport at a decent hour. However, it’s killer on this end. I think I’ve whined about this before, but I’ll do it again: Since we leave Mahdee on a mooring at Fiddlers’ Cove when we travel, it means if the weather is good, we’re rowing the Tinker to shore at 3:30 or so in the morning so we have time to row to the Fiddler’s guest dock, deflate the dingy, rinse the salt water off of it, find a dock cart, lug the dingy in the dock cart up to the car, stash it in the car and then drive the 40 minutes (with no traffic) to the parking lot on Shelter Island we leave the car in while we’re out of town. On that end, David drops me and the luggage at the airport before dropping the car in our “favorite” parking lot. Lucky us, we personally know the homeless fellow who’s been living (and working) out of his van in that parking lot for the past decade or so–way before we arrived on the scene. He keeps an eye on the car for us when we leave it there whether we’re in town with Mahdee anchoring or if we’re traveling far away. The day before our air travel, we arrange for a cab company to pick David up in front of the lot at 5:15 am and while David is getting his 15 minute ride to the airport, I’m getting us checked in so we’re “on the list” of standby passengers and hopefully the first ones on the list for the day. Luckily, San Diego-ans like to sleep in, so all’s generally good.

The last time we flew out, the cab driver was this wonderful and cheerful fellow exactly on time. That’s really unusual here and early in the morning especially. I guess San Diego cab drivers are no different than the rest of the sleepy city. The cab driver, Luiz, loves early morning work. Therefore, we’ve got his card for use from here on out on those early morning flights.

I suppose we really have been in San Diego way too long–we have a favorite cabby, we know the trustworthy homeless people, we have favorite places to go and things to do here. Favorite anchorages and views from the boat. Definitely time for change!