What a long, strange trip it's been....

Well, the last couple of days have been quite eventful. I left St. George at about 7:30 MST on Saturday. The drive out of St. George is awesome because the same kind of rock formations that are in Zion are also along the interstate out of town. (It's actually carved be the same river, the Virgin.) Drove through some pretty country and hit Las Vegas. This is definetly a place where I'm going to have to come back to. On the highway you could see the strip very easily and I'm sure it would have been cooler had I driven through it at night. After Vegas, I-15 turned into a mad house. We were still going 75, but there were aas many cars on the road as you'd expect from like a busy rush hour scene. Also, even though the sign said that the speed limit was 70, no one seemed to care. I set the cruise at 75 and was still being passed by people. When it was two lane freeway, it seemed that the right lane was for people who wanted to do 5-10 over the speed limit, and the left lane was for nut jobs. Anyway, crossing the desert was pretty cool, about as barren as you'd expect from seeing Roadrunner cartoons or something like that. At Barstow, I got off the freeway and started on (I may be wrong on this) Highway 58 that led to Highway 99. I also had to get gas in Barstow, and, are you ready for this? - paid $3.67 a freaking gallon! Oi ve! Anyway, the rest of the trip to Fresno was uneventful, and I got in at about 3ish PST. Spent the rest of the day in the hotel room except for finding some food, and then went to bed.

I had to show up for my first day of IOE yesterday at about 12:15, so I got up at about 9, got all my stuff together and headed to the terminal. At about 12:15, the flight attendant walked in, really nice guy named Monte. We were waiting around for our Captain to show up when I got a call from Flight Ops. saying that he was running late and not to worry. He eventually got there at about 1:00, which made me a little nervous cause we were supposed to depart on our flight 15 minutes later! As it turned out however, the airplane that we were supposed to take on our trip was late, so we had some time to kill. The airplane eventually got there at 2, which of course, put us behind for all our flights. This would be a pattern that would repeat throughout the day. Our first leg was to San Fransisco. It was pretty uneventful, other than the fact we were late. We left out of there for Reno. Lake Tahoe, which we flew right past, was very pretty and I wish I had had my camera so I could have taken pictures. There was a prettty strong wind in Reno, so the captain did the landing, and we were again, still late. By this time I was starting to figure out what order things were supposed to happen in, and I was getting it down pretty well. We left Reno for back to San Fransisco. After the takeoff, the captain asked if I wanted to fly. Sweet! I flew to San Fransisco and did the landing there too. The landing was even pretty good I thought! We left San Fransisco for San Luis Obispo, which is south of San Fran. I did the takeoff, which left a little to be desired. Not exactly my best work. On our way to San Luis, the attitude indicator on the Captain's side started acting up. This is a problem, because even though I have one on my side, the captain still needs one on his side. It seemed to correct itself by the time we got there though, but we were still monitoring it. After the passengers got on in San Luis, we taxiied to the runway, and the captain was supposed to do the takeoff. Well, just as he added power, the attitude indicator started acting up again. Since we were in the air when it happened last time, we were ok then, but since it happened while we were still on the ground this time, we had to taxi off and see if we could fix it. The captain got on the phone with maintenance, and after about 10 minutes of pushing buttons and turning stuff on and off, it was decided that we couldn't go and would have to taxi back to the gates. Our airplane wasn't going anywhere so we were trying to figure out what we were going to do. In the end, we ended up taking another airplane that was done for the day from San Luis. On the flight from San Luis we were empty, cause all the passengers had re-booked flights for the next morning, as at this point, we were two hours behind schedule. It was about 10:30 pm when we left San Luis and we still had a ways to go. By the way, we were supposed to have been done for the day by 10:30. Though I did not do the takeoff, I flew to San Fransisco and did the landing there too. We picked up passengers and got the heck outta there for Medford, OR. I flew the entire leg there and we FINALLY landed at about 2 in the morning. Got to the hotel and I CRASHED. We're meeting today at noon in the hotel lobby for yet another day, though this one should be a little more mundane cause we only have 4 legs as opposed to yesterday's six. I am enjoying this, but as my captain put it, "Yesterday was the day from hell." So hopefully today is better!