STORIES TO TELL WHEN YOUR OLD

     If you don't have experiences when your young how will you have stories to tell when your old:

     Like flying out of San Carlos CA in a little Cessna 150 heading out over the coastal hills to fly over Half Moon Bay and up the coast in the evening.  Flying over the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear night the cars on the bridge and the lights of San Francisco are twinkling and so beautiful.  I'm helping Rod watch for other air traffic as we don't want to fly into anything.  Over the San Francisco Bay across to Oakland to Livermore  and the Red Baron a "fly in" restaurant for dinner.  Cross winds and turbulence prevented us from putting the plane down and it almost felt like we were hovering there on the approach to the runway like a helicopter forever.  We've flown in here a number of times for dinner so tonight we head back across the Bay to San Carlos and end up having dinner at the restaurant in the Sheraton on the Peninsula.

     Like the time we were flying on  employee passes on United out of  Washington Dulles and we stood by but didn't get on any non-stop flights to San Francisco and our only hope was a direct flight through Denver.  There's non-stop flights and connecting flights which are two different planes and two different flight numbers... but there's also what we call direct flights which are flights that may make a stop but it's the same flight number and plane all the way to the destination.  There's also change of gauge flights that I might explain at some other time but they don't relate to this story.  Well, we stood by for the direct flight through Denver and got on and just before the plane landed they announced from the flight deck that this plane which was scheduled to go on to San Francisco after the Denver stop was going to Colorado Springs instead so they dumped all us standbys and paying passengers out at Denver.  There was only one flight left to San Francisco from Denver left that evening so we all hoped we would make it... Rod and I and all the other employee standbys who were hoping to get back to the Bay Area that night.  The plane that was going to San Francisco was coming from Seattle and the only passengers on the flight was the Denver Broncos who had played Seattle that day.  I don't know who won or what but we stood there watching all the Broncos deplane and they were HUGE.  The flight was delayed because the Broncos had trashed the plane and they had to clean up the mess.  It wasn't looking good for us because the flight was a full flight out of Denver and the gate agents advised all us standbys that there was a flight into San Jose we could probably all make and then we could carpool in cabs up to San Francisco Airport to pick up our cars.  Rod and I decided if we didn't get on we would try for the redeye out of Denver back to DC and arrive for the early non stops to San Francisco the next morning so we continued to stand by for the San Francisco flight while all the other standbys went for the San Jose flight.  It's a good thing we did because we were then the only standbys and we got on in First Class and finally made it home that night.      

     Like pulling into the dock at Pillar Point after salmon fishing all day on the Pacific ocean and Rod tells me to get in the bow of the Grady White to jump off and tie the boat to the dock as we pull in only there's someone on the pier I hand the rope off to and he holds the boat for Rod and ties her up.  I think I can step off the front over the rail and don't realize how high up I am so what I do is crawl over the rail and land flat on my back on the pier it's a wonder I didn't fall in the water.

     Like boat camping on Lake Shasta.  We're pulled into a cove and Rod has tied us up in the middle and we've stored everything in the cabin after dinner and blown up the air mattress to sleep in sleeping bags on the deck under the stars.  You feel so close to eternity because without city lights the stars in the night sky are so clear.  We've got a tape in the little TV we've brought with us and we're settling in in the dusk cause night falls real fast on the lake.  Our poles are still in the rod holders with the line pulled up and secured when we hear a jetski come into the cove and a female voice calling out "Oh fishermen, aren't you worried about your poles?"  When we hear this our heads pop up and we startle this poor girl and she heads out of the cove exclaiming "Oh, I'm so drunk".  Don't know what she expected.

     Like the next morning when Rod releases the ropes so we can pull into the bank to go up into the woods to do what everyone does in the morning after coffee and he pulls into the bank for me to step over the bow to jump down only as I go over my right heel catches and I'm hanging there with my hands clenching the rail and my arms stretched and my heel caught on the rail like a ballerina with the highest kick in the world and I'm yelling for him to push my heel off it's stuck and Rod's looking at me with huge eyes.  Finally he lifts my heel off the rail so I can drop down but when I come out of the woods back to the boat he's turned it around so I can step over the back into the boat. Whew.


     I just read this to Rod and he smiled and said "Hopeless" and I smiled and said that's what my family calls "Doing a Sandy".