Thanks again to all the staff at MLA for the Garmin 60csx GPS, a great going away present.  Once you figure out how to use it, it’s a wonderful little gadget.  I used it regularly in Palm Springs to accurately track distance when out walking, to check altitude when driving through the mountains and to find places by address.  I now have it loaded for the next leg of the “big trip,” which is Italy and then France.

And I learned something new as I prepared to enter the addresses of where we are staying.  Although I knew all the countries of western Europe were supposed to be on the disk, I simply could not find any addresses or countries outside of Italy on my GPS.  After hours of exasperation at not being able to solve this problem myself, I called Garmin, and they walked me through the problem in five minutes. 

While the disk has all the western European countries, you cannot load the entire disk to your GPS unless you have a monster memory chip in it.   Lacking a monster-sized chip, you need to be selective about what countries you load.  You can even break the map down into regions of a country and load only those specific regions.  With that knowledge in hand, I quickly pulled up the Garmin disk, selected the areas I expect to be in and downloaded those regions directly to my Garmin.  Viola!  Slick as “hog snot.”  (Don’t ask me a lot about “hog snot; I’m from the East Coast and have no personal experience with it.) 

So leg #2 begins tomorrow with an afternoon flight to Amsterdam and then Amsterdam to Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci Airport.  From there, we will take a short train ride to “Termini” station in the heart of Rome.  At that point, I will turn on my Garmin Csx, find satellites, get my position relative to our apartment, and call a taxi.  It’s not that I don’t trust the Garmin; we have luggage.

Great gift!  Thank you. 

—GPS (Global Positioning System) does not work on an airplane.  I was clutching my newly gifted Garmin handheld GPS as I boarded the plane in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  All this in anticipation of tracking the flight and altitude all the way to Palm Springs.  I mean, who needs the pilot now other than to drive?  I had visions of rushing into the cockpit should instumentation fail or the navigator fall ill.  Maybe not, I don’t think planes have navigators anymore.  Well, forget it—for whatever reason, even though I was forty thousand feet closer to them, I could not pick up even one satellite.  It isn’t the fact that I was in a sealed metal tube either because it worked fine in the very same tube sitting on the ground.  Some very smart reader will have to come up with an answer for me.

The second thing I learned is that on a Palm Springs flight nearly everyone is reading something about where to invest their money.  As I looked over this sea of gray and gray-blue hair, I spotted Fortune and Money Magazines being intently studied for stock market prognostications.  I was hoping to engage a few people in a new game called “guess that ticker symbol”, but since the market has been tanking of late, no-one seemed in the right mood.

I sat next to a young woman who ate the entire flight.  She rang the call bell three times for the flight attendant, requesting three rum cokes, pulled out a bag of cheese curds and another bag of sausages.  She also had this raggety looking stuffed animal that she dragged along with her.  I was getting a little annoyed until she offered me a cheese curd. All was then forgiven  (I didn’t accept the cheese curd, but it was nice to learn that this person who didn’t seem very thoughtful, could be thoughtful.). To show my appreciation, I didn’t sneeze on her; I was developing this awful cold, which I still have.

There must be two people in the cockpit at ALL TIMES.  Have you ever wondered why a flight attendant always stays in the cockpit when either the pilot or the co-pilot leaves?  It’s a rule.  I’m surmising that should the plane have any kind of an in flight emergency, the flight attendant would be right there with a cup of coffee or pillow—very comforting for us in the back of the plane. 

The flight took three and half hours.  It was a little rocky over the Rockies, but not a bad trip at all.  I had an aisle seat and no-one was in the middle.  I saw this as a good omen.  If my sausage-eating friend had been in that seat instead of further away by the window, our relationship may not have ended on such a positive note. 

Do you know that a lot of people sleep with their mouths open on the Palm Springs flight? I’m sure this happens on other flights as well, but somehow this phenomenon stood out.  I had to resist the urge to drop a few M&Ms in as I walked by.

It occurred to me that all of these comarades in flight had a story, a life that would be interesting to know about.  Everyone in life “writes their book”.  I wish I could read them all.  I should have been a social worker.  Oh, wait. I am a social worker.

I’m getting too serious here.  Time to grab the “picker” and retrieve one of those grapefruits off the tree in the back yard.