Well, after a flight that could have gone horribly wrong, we’re here and enjoying life.
How could it have gone wrong? Well, to start, when we got to Sky Harbor, the line at the Midwest counter was huge. Thankfully, it was only long because they hadn’t opened yet – but as someone who has flown almost exclusively Southwest over the years it is definitely a change to fly out of there with what is considered a minor airline.
Taking off was a bit of work too, since for reasons unknown our plane was delayed in getting into Phoenix, so we were delayed getting out. They were nice enough to give us our connecting boarding passes early (Midwest Air flies everything in/out of Milwaukee) which ended up being a very good thing. We sat in the plane on the tarmac for easily half an hour to an hour before we finally got to take off. The flight itself went well, though thanks to all of the delays we had to literally run from the MD82 we flew in on to the CRJ200 we were flying out on – total time in Milwaukee of maybe 10 minutes including time taxiing in both planes. At least Midwest’s cookies are good!
The short flight from Milwaukee to Indianapolis was actually kind of pleasant – smaller plane, much quieter plane, and delightfully short.
Ate at PF Chang’s (at Circle Centre mall) for dinner, after spending what really was too much time trying to find our hotel. While waiting to get in there we saw a two-seater Indycar driving around downtown – unfortunately, I didn’t have anywhere near enough time to even think of grabbing my camera and getting a shot of it.
Today so far has been split into the Infiniti Pro Series (aka Indy Lights) race, which was originally scheduled for yesterday but was rained out. It was a great race – I’ll post photos and a few short videos later when I have time to go through them all. They pulled four wide down the straights and three wide in the turns!
Lunch was at the Mug-N-Bun, a little drive-in food place that looks like a dive but has some great tenderloin sandwiches and some KILLER home-made root beer. While there, we ended up eating lunch with one of the engineers for the Andretti-Green Racing team, who was gracious enough to invite us over to the shop Tuesday morning before our flight for a tour. That should be pretty sweet, to say the least.
We also had a few stops through some of the many racing teams based in Indianapolis running open houses today – most notably Don Schumacher Racing and Guthrie Racing. Plenty of photos from there too that will be going up later.
Right now – just killing time before the “Night Before The 500″ race at IRP – er, O’Reilly Raceway Park.