Life, and Cheap Imitations of It: Can't see the forest through the trees, or perhaps the mountains through the smog...

First full day in LA As I said yesterday, it's much cooler here, which is freaking awesome. Jason and I caught a 2:50 flight out of Fresno yesterday for LA. The flight itself was pretty uneventful. As we neared LA though, there seemed to be no nature left and only city as far as the eye could see. Apparently that's the way it is out here, one city just fading right into another in an endless sea of housing. It was cool though cause we flew right past downtown and I could see places like Dodger's stadium, and the coliseum. LA is a huge airport too, it seemed to stretch on forever, with large hotels leading up to it. We got our bags and then took a shuttle to Long Beach where we are doing our training. It can be as short as 20 minutes if the traffic is good, but alas, the traffic wasn't, and it took us a little over an hour to get there. The hotel we are staying at is another Holiday Inn, right off the 405 Freeway in Longbeach. It's a pretty nice place. We get our own rooms too!

We called our instructor, and he's staying in the same hotel we are, so he told he'd give us a ride to Flight Safety the next morning at...wait for it....3:45 am. Wonderful. We all got to bed as soon as we could, cause it's another early morning. We met our sim instructor the next morning and drove to Flight Safety, which is about 10 minutes away. Flight Safety is a company that was formed in the 60's and all they do is run simulators. Companies come to Flight Safety and contract out pilot training to them. Flight Safety has locations all over the US. They have about 10 simulators per building, which may not seems like much, but when you consider that each of these simulators takes up a whole lot of space (I'll try to get pictures for you) you'd understand why. All these simulators are full motion, using either electrics or hydraulics to simlate movement. So that means when you push the power levers forward to take off, it feels like you're actually moving! Anyway, we got in the sims and did our thing for about 4 hours. Jason and I did a pretty good job and our instructor seemed pretty pleased. He's a really cool guy by the way, been with the company for I think he said 9 years. Anyway, after we got done with our stuff, we chilled for awhile while another group did the same thing with our instructor. After they were done, we briefed on what it was we are going to be doing tomorrow, which mean WE GET TO SLEEP IN. Only until 5, cause he's driving us again at 5:45, but hey, an extra 2 hours is worth it. Tonight is some studying and then a good night's sleep hopefully.