Happy New Year!

It has been a busy week since I left Europe. I guess before I get into all that has happened since I left, I should tackle Bormio first. It sucked. I only made it about 35 seconds in or so and went a bit too far off of a jump, landed on a slight uphill and didn’t get to my left ski fast enough. I was out in the soft snow and was out of the course before I knew it. It was even more embarrassing because I had made a similar mistake in the last training run, so that was a bit more salt in the wound. Add the fact that we sat around for almost two weeks missing Christmas at home, etc. for that one race and it gets a bit frustrating.

I even tweaked my left knee a bit to cap it off. Moving on…

I got on my flight to come home, Zürich to Washington Dulles was no problem, then I got on Dulles to Seattle and there was an “incident”. It was in the news. While it was tough to determine what happened in the air at that time, this guy apparently groped a lady next to him (with her daughter of about 9-10 next to her) and wouldn’t let go. He was about 6 rows back from me. Some other passengers got involved, fisticuffs and ballyhoo ensued, then two air marshals that were in first class came running back and took the guy down, handcuffed him and threw him in the back. It was a bit chaotic. Everyone on the plane was trying to figure out what happened. I went from being mildly curious (I was pretty delirious from the ninehours I had already been in flight) to being annoyed. Soon after that incident I felt that slight shift in velocity where they start to power down the engines and knew that we were going to be landing somewhere. About 10 minutes later they announced that we would be landing in Pittsburgh to offload this guy. I knew it wouldn’t be a touch and go. I had been through a similar thing about two years ago, possibly on the same flight but I can’t remember exactly. It ended up being about a three-hour stop over in Pittsburgh even though they unloaded the guy in the first 5 minutes. We couldn’t get off the plane of course since it wasn’t on the route, so we had to sit in the plane while they pushed paper around or whatever they needed to do.

I got a free chicken sandwich out of it, but that is about all. I was thinking, why didn’t they just keep flying to Seattle? They could have tossed the guy back next to the rear bathrooms and everyone could go back and shake their heads at him in a disapproving fashion while waiting to use the restroom. Deal with him in Seattle and everyone can fill out the paperwork then. Allow the little girl to repeatedly kick him during taxiing in lieu of the therapy she’ll need as a teen. Or maybe that is just me being bitter for having another 3 hours tacked onto a 20 hour transcontinental flight.

At any rate, I got home, slept for a few hours and then went up to Crystal for New Years the next morning. It was awesome. Not sure how much snow was there, but the whole south backcountry had just opened that morning. I hiked out to the top of the “King” 3 times with my brother, dad and Katie and had nearly uncut runs every time in knee to thigh deep powder. We did our traditional champagne on top of the King on the last run of the year and got down to the base around 4:30. It was a great way to end 2007.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under scottmacartney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.