I promised a friend to take her for an excursion by private airplane to a foreign country where they speak a strange tongue unknown to 97 percent of the world’s population. She readily agreed. We folded ourselves into the four-seat propeller-driven single-engine Cirrus SR20 and entered the clouds above Hanscom Air Force Base near Boston. We didn’t see the ground again until about 600′ above a long runway amidst a cold rain-soaked landscape. “Welcome to Quebec City,” I said to her.
[Tip for dogless travelers: the Auberge St-Antoine is truly a fine hotel in the old city.]
I’ve got no comment on the post, but a comment on blogs.law.harvard.edu’s weblog system–it’s very user-unfriendly to forget everything entered if no email is supplied by the user, especially since the comment window doesn’t indicate required fields.
It’s about time they moved to a decent blogging platform. Winer’s software sucks bigtime
Phil, you could have driven her to Danbury Ct.
The inevitable question: Did the trip yield…. uhhh …. errr…. ummmm… results?
I hope you two remembered to bring your passports. The US has been getting more strict about requiring them for re-entry.
Is BED a Port of Entry or did you have to stop somewhere else on the way back? What was the procedures like? Was Customs a hassle or no big deal? Thinking of doing the trip myself but I am not in the mood for a hassle.
We did bring passports but they were never requested. You can clear at BED but you need to provide a lot of notice, $50 on a weekday 9-4 pm, and $200 on weekends (couldn’t figure out if Memorial Day qualified). The Customs people don’t even know what the fees are because they are assessed by Massport. The weather on a direct route to BED wasn’t so wonderful so we went to KBTV, Burlington, VT, instead. At BTV it is free to clear customs and it took only a few minutes. I’ve never had a problem with U.S. Customs except in Key West, FL where I was almost one hour late due to headwinds and being held on the ground in the Bahamas. I had called Flight Service to update Customs on my arrival time but the message hadn’t reached the agents on the ground. They were angry with me and actually took a bag out of the plane and poked around a little bit.
So far I’ve done Bangor, ME, Buffalo, NY, Flint, MI, various spots in Alaska, Calexico, CA, and Bellingham, WA and it was very friendly and fast in all of those places.