my travels in pixels

After four months in Canada it is time to move south. Before we even got fifteen minutes down the road Lindsay remembered that he had left the stone guard back at the house. Luckily we had factored in an extra half hour into our travel plans. Any further and we would have left it behind. The Visa system is flawed. When you have a five year visa for the USA it allows you to stay up to six months per year, even all at once. When we first came over we filled in an i94 with our details and this was stapled into our passports, when we left it was taken by the airport or the country you were entering and given back to border control. Now it's electronic. No bits of paper, but what that means is that they only track you when you come into the country, not when you leave. So if you change your mind and leave early, bad luck, your time was allocated and you don't get it back. The first night we stayed at Walmart, we do this for transit stops. No point in paying for an RV park whe...

Lindsay has always wanted to go to the Boeing factory which was only half an hour away. The place is gigantic as you can imagine and 41,000 people work there. 30,000 work on the day shift that starts at about 5.30am, in 6 minute increments. We got to see the new 787 which is made out of composite - carbon fibre; what Lindsay used to make his yacht masts out of 20 years ago. Qantas had one on the production line that will only carry about 200 passengers and will cost about 300 million. For obvious reasons you aren’t allowed to take anything in there that could take a picture or movie. While they sound like they are the only ones making planes and they do make a lot, there are other competitors out there. They have orders for the next 20 years and as you have to make a one third down payment at time of order, they must make a fair bit of interest on their customers’ behalf. The first night it rained but since then the days have been lovely, warm and sunny. The guide at Boeing said it wa...