Flying from Whitehorse to Calgary, Seattle, and Phoenix
There wasn’t anything important to tell you about for 6 weeks, but I just returned last night from a wonderful road trip in Arizona with my daughter, and now I have lots to tell you about and show you.
This was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment trip – after decided to see if I could do it, I had mapped out a route on October 9th, then over a couple of days made all the flight, hotel, and car reservations. From Phoenix there would be overnights at Kingman, Quartzsite, Yuma, Ajo, Tucson, and back at Phoenix. After my brain-injury challenges over the past 5 years, it felt extremely good to be back to a point where I could accomplish this. I was fairly certain that I had set a schedule that was manageable but I was completely certain that whatever happened, Andrea would have my back. See an interactive map of the basic route here.
I’ll start with the 3 flights required to get there. My regular readers know that I enjoy flying and airports, and that the world seen from 35,000 feet fascinates me. I had hoped to be able to blog as we travelled as I used to, but that didn’t work.
The first flight was on Air North from Whitehorse to Calgary to meet Andrea. The flight departed on Friday, November 15th at 08:50, a cold, miserable morning.
It was cloudy almost all the way to Calgary, though there was a bit of a break over the eastern foothills of the Rockies south of Hinton.
Arriving in Calgary (YYC) at 11:50, I had a lovely afternoon and evening with all of my Calgary family – 8 of us in total. It was a perfect way to start the trip.
One of my granddaughters dropped Andrea and I at the airport at about 10:00 on the 16th and we made our way the gate for our Horizon flight to Seattle. Calgary airport has lots of excellent art – I particularly liked this river down one of the ramps. As you can see, the airport was pretty quiet.
This large piece is “Buffalo,” created from blocks of granite in 2013 by Stewart Steinhauer of Creston, BC.
By 11:15 we were settled in on Horizon Air’s 2023 Embraer ERJ-175, N656QX. The 2-wide seating is really nice. Horizon is affiliated with Alaska Airlines in that they’re both owned by the Alaska Air Group. As with Air North, Alaska/Horizon can always be counted on for great service at every point.
Taxiing to the runway at 11:38. When I first looked at the next few photos, I was rather shocked – it was sure a different world when we returned a week later!!
The growth of Calgary and its suburbs has been amazing for the past couple of decades. This view looks to the east, up McKnight Boulevard – the next community across that vast prairie is Strathmore, about 40 km away.
Headed west towards Seattle, looking over the Bow River and Highway 2a at the southern limit of Calgary.
The Chains Lake Reservoir along Highway 22 southwest of Nanton, at 11:53. We knew from the weather forecasts that we would hit clouds very soon. We were on the wrong side of the plane – the right side had great views of the Rockies in the sunshine. I usually consider which side will provide the best views before choosing seats, but apparently hadn’t this time.
Three minutes later, I got one more shot before the world below went grey.
It’s a fairly short hop to Seattle – scheduled as an hour and 48 minutes but we apparently had a good tail wind. Seattle had a very low cloud layer and it was raining.
Unloading with a ramp instead of a jetway allowed for a good photo of our plane.
It was now after 1:30 so we were due for lunch, and the Ballard Brew Hall looked like a good option.
The fish and chips were decent, and I gave them 4 stars on my Google review, far higher than their average of 2.4 – I gave 3 stars for food, 4 for atmosphere, and 5 for service, with the comment “The food was good, the service extremely good, and the prices high but about what we expect at an airport.” However, with a $13.50 beer (!!), the total with tip was $80.05 USD – that’s $112.71 Canadian.
The floor was wonderful 🙂
We had over 4 hours to kill at Sea-Tac. I took a few photos, but not many.
Our final flight, though booked through Alaska, was with American Airlines, in one of their Bombardier CRJ-700 series planes. We departed almost half an hour late due to some sort of mechanical problem.. The next photo was shot as we were taxing at 4:26 Seattle time (5:25 Calgary/Phoenix time).
At the runway 3 minutes later.
Rainy nights can offer some interesting images.
An interesting abstract perhaps, but not at all what I had in mind. This was shot at ISO 1250, with a 1-second exposure (so no hope of getting a clear image).
Boosting the ISO to 16000 gave me 1/40th of a second, and the image I wanted.
At 7:46 we were taxiing up to the terminal at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX).
PHX is huge when you’ve had a long day…
It’s a lengthy hi-speed train ride to the Car Rental Center, but the Sixt clerk there was extremely friendly and made getting the car paperwork done easy. I didn’t take any photos of the very impressive Car Rental Center, but scooped the next photo from Google Maps – A. Porat shot it.
It was a long walk to the car, but the Sixt clerk down in the garage was also friendly and professional, and when I saw the car I knew it had been the right choice, despite the clerk thinking it was on odd choice for Fall – I got an extremely good rate on a 2024 BMW 430i convertible 🙂
It was a short drive to the SureStay by Best Western Phoenix Airport. I’ll just quote my Google review of it: “It’s a Motel, not a Hotel. The room (#104) was basic but freshly renovated which was very nice. Several parking spots around our room were filled with construction supplies so we had to park quite a distance away. Check-in was quick and simple. This is a rough part of town – even the McDonalds where we ended up for an 11 pm meal was quite awful, with extremely slow drive-thru service and a druggie panhandling. Speaking of that, the security deadbolt on our door didn’t line up properly so didn’t work. I’ll be cancelling the night had booked here at the end of this trip.” Yes, I did cancel the other night.
We were both more than ready for a good night’s sleep – on Sunday we had 198 miles to drive to Kingman, the home of a few things related to the famous Route 66.
About The Author
Good day Murrster, your itinerary was nicely organized and presented, traveling is a beautiful thing, that Beamer going to be beautiful cruising down south, even with the top up 😎
Hi Paul. The Beemer was SO FINE with no lid 🙂
Glad to see you back! I so enjoy your stories.
Thanks, Patsy. It’s sure nice to be back with a real Adventure to share 🙂