Play ball!

I was up well before dawn this morning, driving into the AW139 simulator in Newark bright and early, thankful for the clear skies, after the drizzly late night drive from the airport to my hotel just a few hours prior, arguing with the car's GPS the entire route and taking a few wrong exits.  I prefer a map.   Feeling like a horse with blinders on, you are kept slightly off kilter when given only the next upcoming turn, as opposed to the bigger picture one gets from navigating off a map.  Besides lacking "the big picture", it leaves one scrambling if the GPS should ever fail, perish the thought.  I did get there eventually and managed a little bit of sleep.  Sim time is at a premium and you take what you can get, which is often the wee hours of the morning.  I am here in New Jersey to learn to run the simulator for the Agusta Westland AW139, so I can give yearly check rides to other pilots, give type endorsements, etc..  Having run the Super Puma sim in Stavanger Norway for years, I was pretty comfortable running "the box" but I needed to learn the software and interface of this particular unit.  This unit is generations newer than what I'm used to, but the interface is intuitive, and things move along at a good pace.  What I didn't expect was to be finished not long after eleven in the morning, with the sun shining bright, the warmest day yet of spring, and New York just a half hour drive away.

Luckily a good buddy from South Africa showed up fresh from Johannesburg.  We had met in Tanzania the year prior, and he mentioned he'd never been to a baseball game, and a quick check on his iphone showed a Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees game in two hours, at Yankee Stadium.  The Season Opener no less.  You can't get much more classic than that!  Forgetting the nap I had planned, I'll sleep plenty when I'm dead, we head off towards Brooklyn, trusting that damn GPS once again, New York traffic a nightmare, a few wrong turns, finding parking in the mayhem, hiking thirty minutes, only to find the game sold out long before we even came up with the idea.  As we lamented our fate over beer in a nearby pub,  we found some ticket hawkers, or rather, they found us, and next thing you know, we're watching the game, beer in hand, sitting in the sun, in Yankee Stadium......another box ticked.  I apologize to all you baseball fans, but it's not the most exciting game, and we spent more time watching the crowd.  It looked like a great number of the boys were out more for the socializing and beer.  Leaving before the multitudes of unhappy New Yorkers, as the Yankees were far behind, we put the GPS away and trusting our pilot senses, just head South.  Greenwich Village not more than twenty minutes later, we find some artsy little Spanish restaurant and tell stories of daring doo over more beer and a fine meal......not a bad day at all.