Smackie the Frog

In the past I’ve talked about making ridiculous travel choices based on what airplane I wanted to fly. Usually it isn’t that ridiculous, though. There is only 1 non-stop flight between here and San Francisco, so usually, unless you want to pay extra, you’re going to be making a connection somewhere. And as long as you are making a connection, you might as well have some fun with it, right? If I’m going to be flying through Chicago anyway, I don’t see the big deal in trying to find a way to fly on a 747.

But my next trip takes the cake. I will be going to visit Phil and Helen in early November, and this time I decided to fly into San Jose, because it will shut Phil up about asking why I don’t fly into San Jose. Not to bore you too much with airline details, but if you want to fly between St. Louis and San Jose you basically go through Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver, or maybe Chicago. That is, that’s what you do if you are a normal person and just want to get there as quickly as possible.

And, as a matter of fact, on the way out there I am being a very normal person. I fly from St. Louis -> Dallas, and then Dallas -> San Jose. Perfectly standard. If a normal person were booking their trip, they probably would have chosen this exact same flight, since it allows me to get in a full day’s work before travelling, and also happened to be the cheapest fare.

But then there was this flight on the way back that was just too tempting. You see, I’ve never flown on an propeller driven airplane. I’ve been on a bunch of flights in my life, but they have all been on jets. That’s pretty easy to do because most flights, except the very shortest, are on jets, and even a lot of the very shortest are on jets. But I found one.

So on the way back, I’m flying from San Jose -> Sacramento on a Dash-8 Q400, which is a very modern turboprop airplane. But it is a prop airplane. For those of you not familiar with Californian geography, San Jose is about 90 miles away from Sacramento. It is completely ridiculous that I’m doing this, because then I fly from Sacramento -> Salt Lake City and then Salt Lake -> St. Louis. Way out of my way, and adds a whole bunch of time to my travel.

But I don’t care. Because there probably aren’t going to be a lot of opportunities for me to do this. And if I was travelling with anyone else, they’d look at me like I was crazy and smack me if I tried to schedule something like this.

So yeah, I’m weird. But also very excited.