Gigantus Destroyer of Cities

 Ok, so I alluded to it in a previous post and I figured its worth making a post to explain my new living situation.

  About a year ago, I was living in another city than the one my children live in. During Covid, so about seven-ish years ago, my employment situation got a little dicey and I needed to fall back on groundling-employment options that were a lot more available in the larger city nearby. The small town on Vancouver Island that we had settled in pre-divorce was about an hour and a half driving time from Victoria. Victoria being the capital city of BC and with a population of about 300,000 people, the largest city by far on Vancouver Island. There were a few other reasons for making the change that I'll keep to myself, but suffice to say at the time of the decision it made a lot of sense. 

  Over the last year or so though, things were getting harder in terms of finding enough time for the kids, particularly with one of them in the midst of adolescence and my job having me away from home so much. With the kids in school this meant that I had to schlep them back and forth every weekend when I was home. It was quickly becoming obvious that I needed to be closer so that I could have time with them during the school week and not just weekends. Depending on my schedule, I might only get two weekends a month and if the gods really did frown upon me, there were months when I only got one. 

 So, the search began for a suitable living space in their town. 

  Like most areas of Canada, particularly post-covid, inflation and housing needs for a swelling population are an issue. Coupled by the inherent challenges of living on an island, it hadn't missed us in the housing crisis department. The same small apartment that I had previously rented in that town, only three years previously had now doubled in price. Yes, doubled.  

  Yes, I did enquire to my ex landlord about renting the same apartment I had moved out of, haha.

  I'm not a huge fan of apartment life either, really. Not that I felt like I had a lot of options financially, but I didn't really relish the idea of living in an apartment again. The space needs of my kids was growing as well and it felt like the size of apartment I would need, in addition to the fact it would sit empty for half of every month, made the apartment hunt more than a little depressing.

  I started to look around at other options that might make the move slightly less painful. Initially, I thought that a sailboat might not be a bad idea. I had met a few people that lived on boats and there were more than a few of the them at my company that did just that. It fit the bill as far as unique and enjoyable and the kind of thing that I always thought would be pretty cool. The further I looked into it though, the more the realities started to look a little less cool. Moorages that allowed live-aboard privileges were in very short supply, with wait lists in the multi-year range. Most of the local marinas that would be close enough for me were either full or didn't allow live-aboard parking. Some people I talked to alluded to  " sneak-aboard " living, but with young kids I doubted being able to pull off that level of discretion.

  Then there was the space issue. Sailboats are small and space for everything was at a premium. No storage, cramped quarters and compromises in every part of your daily life. Being rocked to sleep by the waves sounded nice, but the reality wasn't quite there the more I talked to people about their experience.

   Boats weren't cheap either. I talked to a few people about renting, but those were in short supply as well and I never did really find anything that really struck me as workable. The idea of having all of your worldly belongings balanced over top of a medium that would destroy them all completely in twenty minutes flat in the event of an accident while you were on the other side of the world wasn't all that comforting either.

  So, I switched gears and started to look into RV living. Lots of people in my area were doing it and it seemed like it could tick a few boxes in having a space I could enjoy within the budget that I had. After looking at a lot of different options, I eventually concluded that, like the sailboat idea, the romance of the idea didn't quite match up to the reality. Most RVs are built to be light-weight, for towing or driving, depending on the type of RV. This meant most of the interior fixings were plastic, and made specifically for that model of RV. That equates to expensive parts and repairs, as well as everything being plastic, flimsy and not really built for long term habitation. Like the sailboats as well, very little storage and the places that it seemed were available for legal permanent residence in an RV seemed to be trailer park like existences. Not really what I was looking for.

  One thing I did find interesting in the RV world was the economics of buying a portable home. Disclaimer, I have never purchased an RV, nor lived in one, sort of, but this was my experience, take it as you will. 

  Like a traditional home it was actually possible to purchase an RV brand new, off the lot, with a 25 year amortized " mortgage ". Suddenly the 100,000 dollar, no holds barred " luxury " glamping mobile, or alternative housing, had a monthly price tag that looked really tempting and affordable. Roughly 600 bucks a month.

 Yes, you still had to add rental cost for the parking spot, insurance, utilities, blah blah blah. 

  So lets say your monthly cost was in the ballpark of 2000 bucks a month. Still sounds kinda do able right? I mean, for 100K, you get a LOT of RV. Thats a big unit, brand new, modern appliances, top shelf. 

  But its a trap! 

  These things are really not designed for full time occupancy, they simply wont hold up to that kind of wear and tear. There is no land to appreciate in value, only a mechanical asset that only depreciates. And boy howdy do they depreciate. 10 years later, that thing is destroyed, or being held together by near constant maintenance of the pricey variety. Couple of spicy Wet Coast winters with an undiscovered roof leak and that thing is practically worthless. With your 25 year mortgage having 75% of its principal still intact. Gulp.

  Even with folks buying them for true Recreational use, I still struggle with the steep depreciation of RVs in general. I suppose if you have oil-field cash burning a hole in your pocket, toys are toys, but I feel like anyone who actually goes to the trouble of crunching the numbers, should run, not walk away from them. If " crunching numbers " is something your financial situation has no need for, sure, ok.

  During my search and research of RVs however, I kind of stumbled onto something that I had always imagined as a kid. What about living in  converted Bus? I literally used to dream of living in a bus when I was a kid. In my juvenile dreams, it was a graphitied, splatter-painted school bus that I would travel the world in, but surely there were options slightly more realistic? 

  Sure enough, there was, is, are options for that sort of thing. I know that for sure, because I now live in a Bus!

  Behold, “ Gigantus, Destroyer of Cities. "  ( Named by my youngest child )

  Here’s a bit of a virtual tour of my Home. 

  Some people who have converted busses take the original air-powered door off and replace it with a standard hinged home door. I find the stock door to be quite usueable.

  When you enter, it’s four steps up into the front of the bus. Over the front entrance area, there is a large curtain on rails that can block off the whole front window. In the summer, you get a ton of sunshine through the front windows, so the curtain is a minimum for blocking some of the unwanted heat. The light is nice, but the heat is the enemy. In the summer I put up reflective foil, bubble wrap panels in the window with Velcro as well to keep the heat down. In the winter the natural light and views are nice.

  Stepping into  the bus, you are now in the Living Room, with a couch along one wall and two recliner swivel chairs and a small fold-out table on the opposite side. 

  The couch folds down into an additional twin bed, if desired, and the base of the couch is actually the giant fresh-water holding tank.

  Stepping further down is the kitchen area. A standard apartment sized fridge and counter space / drawers on one side and the stove-top, sink and toaster oven on the other side.

  Hot water heat is a propane on-demand, as is the shower. The shower is right at the edge of the on-demand heaters capabilities. You can get unlimited hot water, but you can’t go full blast with the water pressure, but almost. The stove top burners are also plumbed into the same propane bottle as the hot water heater. The propane bottle lives in the basement luggage bay and honestly in a year of full time use of the stove and hot water, I’ve changed the bottle once. Roughly 75 bucks to fill.

  After the kitchen, down the hall is the kids bunk beds on one side, complete with a small desk, closet and clothing drawers, with the shower “ room “ on the opposite side.

 The shower room is completely tiled, with shower heads and wands at both end of the shower room. Technically room for two people to shower at once, but a very comfortable and roomy shower for one. The windows of the bus are heavily tinted, so as long as its not dark outside, you can shower with the windows blinds open and its a very pleasant “ outdoor “ experience.

   After the shower room is the bathroom, complete with an RV toilet, vanity sink and mirror and a Bidet

 ( amaze amaze amaze! )

  At the back of the bus is the bedroom. It has two twin beds that are built on top of rolling, hinged storage compartments. The beds tilt up on hydraulic rams, allowing a huge amount of storage beneath each bed. Since the beds are wheeeled, they can be pushed together and “ attached “ to make a large king size bed. The only problem with the king size bed is that now you have two narrow aisles on the sides of the bed, which isn’t very convenient. When the beds are apart, the wide aisle down the middle is much more practical. Since it’s usually just me sleeping back there, the beds usually stay apart. 

  In the bedroom is also a desk with drawers underneath and a full size combo washer/dryer as well as a closest and a couple bookshelves along the back wall.

  In the bedroom in the back is also the roof hatch to get up top on the roof, where the solar panels are.

  Along both sides of the bus, three of the large windows on each side are actually the busses original Emergency Escape Windows. The large windows are hinged at the top and are designed to “ butterfly “ open for emergency egress.  The three windows on the right side ( passenger side ) of the bus, I like to open up to get a nice breeze into the bus on a cool day to air it out. In the bathroom ceiling as well is a very powerful vent fan as well, so air movement in or out of the bus isn’t an issue.

  The more I researched the options for a Bus as a residence, the more I liked it.

  Busses are built for hauling people around, so they are typically very over-powered compared to your average RV. Fuel economy isn't as much a selling factor for a commercial bus than it is for your average RV. Huge diesel engines to pull 50 or so people and all their gear up and over the mountains or across the plains. 

  Commercially made Recreational Vehicle Busses are available, right from the factory, kitted out as mobile living spaces. These are mostly on the very very high end of cost though. Think Rock Star tour bus or Gazillionaire vacation toys.  Out the factory door, brand new, these units are close to a million dollars, I kid you not. That was definitely not in my budget, so much of my search was more in the area of commercial busses that had been " converted " by someone. Sold and operated as a people-hauler and then eventually, lovingly and at significant cost in time and effort, made into living quarters. 

  The range of quality on some of these units was pretty wide though. Some of the were pretty rustic, with the builders having a lot more dreams than they had skill in their construction. Plywood windows, house doors shoe horned onto old school busses, wood stove chimneys poking though holes carved into roofs. School busses hacked with raised roofs and " custom " engineering.  

 There also weren't a ton of them out there on the market. Lots of units for sale in the US, but the import process was discouraging, to say the least. From the few examples I found online of people bringing them up from the states into Canada were very time and money intensive. Time I had, money not so much.

  In my search, I came across a youtube video of a guy who had done the conversion himself on a 1992 Prevost charter Bus. I haven't had a lot of luck in inserting videos onto the blog, but if it appears below, that means I figured it out.

  Long story short, JM, who built the bus, had bought it with the intention of using it as both a touring machine for a year or two of travel and then parking it on a piece of land he had purchased and would live in it while he built his traditional home. He was a homebuilder by trade and did a very nice job on the conversion and the interior fixtures as a result. It had to be fairly self sufficient as well as the property he was intending to build on was bare land, without any services.

  Thus, it has a solar power system with a 3000 Watt inverter and 800W of solar panels affixed to the roof. It also has a water filtration and storage system where you can pull water into the on-board tank, filtering it in while you load and filtering again when you need it. It has a decent amount of both fresh water, grey water and black water storage as well.

  For heating, it relies mostly on a Diesel Heater, installed under one of the kitchen cabinets, drawing fuel from a tank " downstairs " in one of the luggage bays. The Bus has a great HVAC line for its on-board heating system, which uses hot engine coolant to warm the cabin and pipes it along each wall and up under each window. I know his intention was to use that line for the heating system he installed, but for wahtever reason, he didnt end up using it. Instead, there is a simple line of PVC pipe that runs from the diesel heater, along one side of the interior, to pipe that hot air into the living room, the bathroom and finally the back bedroom. 

  After living in the Bus for a year and all four seasons, I've learned a fair bit about the challenges of using this type of structure as a dwelling.

   First, this bus, like most of them, is all window. The large windows run down each side of the structure, making all of the " walls ", not walls, but window. Kind of like a greenhouse. actually, not kind of, more like EXACTLY like a greenhouse. In the wintertime, when I'm trying to keep it warm inside, this is a blessing. As soon as the sun comes up, so do the window blinds and you can warm up the interior with free solar heating.  Well, nothing is free I suppose, the cost is just deferred till the summertime, when the heat is paid back. The abundance of windows do make for a very nice living space though, depending on where you are parked. Luckily, I managed to find a great spot on the back of a rural property where I am surrounded on 3 sides by trees and tucked out of the way of the property owner and their spaces. 

  The Diesel heater is fairly effective at warming up the bus, its forced air heat running at max setting will warm the bus up from 0c to a comfy 19-20 in about a half hour. It has a fancy remote control with all kinds of timers and settings, but its of Chinese Origin and the manuals are not easy to decode, so I run it cave man style. I turn it on, on MAX, then turn it down to medium if I'm going to run it for an extended period of time. The cost to run it isn't all that efficient though. I can fill the tank with about 40L of Diesel, or about 10 Gallons, that costs about 80 dollars in CAD. That will run for about two weeks with fairly heavy usage in the winter. 

  Where I live, we generate most of our electricity using Hydro Electric power. The massive investments in building Dams and generating equipment were made generations ago and as a result, we have some of the lowest cost electricity on the continent. I went ahead and bought two little oil-filled radiator heaters for about a hundred bucks each and they are significantly less expensive to use for heat than the Diesel Heater. On a cold winters morning, I can crank everything up in the morning and be toasty warm in about 20-30 minutes. The electric heaters doing the work of keeping it warm for the rest of the day, quite efficiently. I did some reading on the choice of electric forced air vs electric radiators and came to the conclusion that radiators were the way to go, more from a safety standpoint then anything else. Most of the sources I came across recommended radiant electric heat for all-day use vs forced air. 

   My electric bill using electric heaters costs me about 60 bucks a month vs the 160 I would spend on Diesel if I went with the diesel heater alone. The diesel heater also needs a fairly skookum fan to push that hot air to all corners of the bus, so the quiet of the electric radiators is nice too.

  I don't know for sure how much insulation was put into the walls, such as they are, during the construction of the bus, but I don't think there was very much if I had to guess. On a winters day, with the interior heated up, I can see the outlines of the bus structure on the exterior fiberglass of the bus, leading me to think there's not much in the walls to separate the warmth inside from exposure to the cold exterior walls. Its difficult to insulate a window and a couple extra inches of " wall" that would be necessary to hold insulation would be a significant loss in interior space, so I can understand the challenge someone faces on building something like this.

  That's the winter challenge, and that's the easy part.

  In the summer, the greenhouse effect is even quicker and harder to combat. There is a large built-in air conditioner in the back bedroom that is probably around 15K BTU, which should be enough to cool the square footage of the living space. The problem, I think, is that the living space is arranged in a long narrow space as opposed to a square, such as you would find in a typical home. Thus, you might condition the air nicely at one end of the space, but struggle to treat the air and heat build up at the other end. I have a large ventilation fan built into the roof of the bathroom to move air out of the Bus, as well as a stand-up box fan I bought that sits in the hallway in the middle, to move that air around. It still doesn't quite do it though. The back bedroom where the main air conditioner lives, can be comfortably refrigerated, but that cold air doesn't quite make it to the main living space up front.  If you close the bedroom door, the bedroom can be cooled very quickly. Even with the vent fan and box fan on and doing their best to move that air around, it still stays pretty warm up front though.

  It didn't take me very long last summer to realize this and that it wasn't going to be very comfortable unless I came up with something else, so I added more air conditioning capacity. I bought one of the stand-up, portable A/C's and made a temporary home for it one the drivers seat of the Bus. I got a little wooden board that can sit on the seat itself and make a flat, weight-supporting platform out of the drivers seat and took apart a little window to make an exhaust port. With the extra AC working on the air up front, and the big AC working in the back, I can usually keep up with the heat, but just barely. On a 30 degree day, with the sun shining directly on the bus all the AC's on and the window blinds drawn, I can maintain 23-25 degrees inside. Just barely. I didn't get a chance last year to test it out against a 40 degree day, but my suspicion is that it would be a struggle. Luckily in this part of Canada, we don't get a ton of those days.

 As I write this, its,  7AM on May 21st, and the sun is out. It went down to 12? 13? degrees last night and I routinely turn all the heaters off overnight in those temperatures. It gets chilly in the morning, so I'll run the diesel heater for an hour or so to take the chill off and bring the inside up to about 18 degrees before I shut it down for the day. The trick of course, is to let it stay cool enough that I don't have to fight it in an hour or two when the sun starts to warm it up inside, but not too cold as to not enjoy plodding around inside without a sweater on.

  Ok, so that's one of the challenges in using an unconventional structure for a living space. 

  Another part is where to park the thing. When I first started looking at this as an option, I had a look around to see where I could put it, and what the going rate was for renting out a place to park. Ideally, it would be a spot that had access to utility hook ups. While it is built for somewhat " off grid " capability, those capabilities come with some pretty big compromises and effort required to deal with water and waste in particular. So, a spot that already had the hookups necessary for sewage water discharge, fresh water supply and pressure as well as access to electricity.

  Most of the spots I found when I was looking at RV's in general, were basically trailer parks. Not what I was really looking for. Most of the trailer park communities were geared towards the economy of living in mobile homes or RV's as opposed to the novelty or alternative lifestyle. That meant not only were you living cheek to cheek with your neighbor, your neighbors might be folks who had no other options for housing than the cheap housing that a trailer, RV or mobile home might represent. 

  Alright, I'll stop dancing around it, I didn't really want to live with the Poors....eww. 

  That might sound a little harsh, but there's some truth in there and I could spend an hour talking about how it didn't make me a bad person for not wanting it live in that demographic, but it is what it is.

  What I really wanted, was a rural space, access to utilities and some room. Unfortunately, the local zoning bylaws were written to protect the investment in private property that land owners had made in their purchases. I perused the classified ads that I could find online to see what the going rate for a serviced lot on a private acreage would be and found that there really wasnt a lot out there. Or at least it seemed like there wasnt a lot out there. Truth is, there were tons of people looking to rent out portions of their properties , they just couldn't advertise it and draw attention to their illegal setups. If you had a rural property, putting in a serviced lot or two for RV or Tiny Home living made a ton of sense, it just wasnt legally allowed. The few ads that I did find, put me in contact with enough homeowners that I had access to the word-of-mouth network of their neighbours and friends who were doing just that.

  In the end, I found a ton of places that had made an investment in running sewer, electrical and water hookups out to various corners of their acreage properties. One place I found had a literal trailer park in their back-40. 5 RV's all lined up side by side. Out of view of the road, with gated access to the property and their was no reason for the local bylaw officer to ever know what was going on. She wanted 1000 bucks a month for a spot,  so thats 5,000 dollars a month towards her mortgage for the property. Not bad.

  I looked at a few, but once I found the space I'm currently in, it was a no-brainer. 12 minute drive to the kids and their schools, 10 minutes from the grocery store. Secluded in the back corner of their heavily gardened property. A nice gravel pad for parking the Bus on, with power, water and sewer hookups, for about 900 a month, with power metered on top of that. 

  One thing that I thought was going to be a challenge, storage, turned out to be a non-issue. At least with this particular bus-build, anyway. JM had left the interior luggage racks above the seats mostly intact. Aside from removing a few over the bathroom, shower room and bunk bed area, it had over head storage running the entire length of the living room, kitchen and bedroom areas. Perfect built in cabinets. Coupled with the generous storage in the " basement " with the luggage bays, storage isnt an issue at all. In fact after a year of living in it, I still have overhead storage space inside that I don't even use.

  For me personally, the space provided in a 40 foot bus was perfect. I don’t feel cramped, nor do I feel like I have extra, unused space going to waste. I pretty much use every square inch of the bus. Even when I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, there were spaces that I didn’t really use. A closet that was full of long term storage and only got opened once every couple of months. A kitchen cabinet full of less-used kitchen appliances that only saw action on Thanksgiving or Christmas meal baking. Living in the bus space has forced me to take a more pragmatic view towards accumulating goods that I don’t really need. Sure, an air-fryer might be nice to have, but if I have to dedicate the space to storing it for the 3 times a year that I used it, it didn’t make as much sense.

  Having the outdoor space around the bus is one of the biggest advantages for me. I can sit outside in the forest and watch the birds. I don’t have neighbors above or below me, no tip toeing around to not set off Mrs Johnson or worrying about the weekend parties of the young kids down the hall. My space in particular backs onto a green space the has a creek running through it, so its a bit of a rural highway for the local Bears, Deer, Elk and occasionally a Cougar. 

  The flexibility and options of a home on wheels is a nice insurance policy as well. If things change in my domestic situation with the kids, or the local bylaws, I can pick up and move if I had to. Likewise for Zombie Apocalypse.

  During the purchase of the bus however, there was one small catch. It seems to have developed a fairly significant mechanical issue with its transmission. A cursory diagnosis by a local shop during the pre-purchase had them advising that a a new Transmission was more than likely in its future. As it stands now, it isn’t able to shift into 4th or 5th gear reliably. I moved it a couple hundred kilometers to its current parking space, under its own power, just limiting to 3rd gear speeds at maximum ( about 80km/h ). So it’s still mobile, just not really able to do any touring until it’s repaired. This did bring the price down a bit to account for the eventual transmission replacement, which is NOT cheap for a unit like this. Since I don’t really have any plans to do any touring with it anytime soon, it’s not a huge deal for me. Quite frankly, if it simply lived out its life as a semi-mobile tiny-home, it wouldn’t really affect my plans.

  I’ve been working on getting the gravel “ pad “ that bus sits on and the surrounding dirt into a bit of a “ lawn “. Since I am away from home for 2 weeks a month and honestly, don’t really want to be bothered with lawn-care, I’ve been trying to get a bit of a ground cover just to add some green. I’ve been reading about Clover and Micro Clover as an alternative to grass, so I threw down a couple bags of Micro Clover last summer when I first moved onto this spot. It took a fair bit of watering to get the clover to take, and we go into fairly restrictive water use rules around mid summer. Although the package assured me that the amount of seed I put down for the size of the lawn should have sufficient, it’s still a little on the patchy side after a year. Whether that is a result of inconsistent watering leading to a low germination rate or what, I’m not 100% sure. I also read that “ micro clover “ reverts to normal-clover after a couple of years, so this spring I threw down a bunch of regular clover seeds. The clover is suppose to be low-to-no maintenance as far as mowing, but also requires little water. I’m not really interested in dedicating a lot of resources, both time, money and water, into maintaining a decorative lawn. However, its much more pleasant sitting outside in a green space rather than a dirt patch. Also, the little rabbits we have sure seem to enjoy the clover. Might explain the patchy clover s well I suppose, haha.

  These pictures are last summer and this spring, so you can see the difference. I’ve been away from home for the past two months on a training course, and I put down a significant amount of regular-clover seeds before I went away. My landlord also put up an auto timer sprinkler for me, so I am quite curious as to the results when I get back. I’l try and remember to one back here and throw a pic up to see if it’s dramatically different.   

  Lots of people have found the fact that I live in a bus to be quite interesting and I honestly enjoy the oddity of it as well. I think most people assume it’s some kind of sketchy budget housing solution but honestly, its fairly high end living, in my opinion.

  At the end of the day, when I look at it from a purely financial aspect, I spend pretty much the same amount every month as I would on an apartment. Between the financing of the purchase price, the pad rent, utilities, the cash flow is about the same. I get the added benefit of a pleasant rural setting, privacy and a small amount of equity in the residual value of the bus itself, if I ever decide to move and/or sell it. That gain in equity is offset by the liability of maintenance and repair, but in the end, with the quality of life I get for me personally, I feel like its a much better option than what the equivalent purchasing power would get me in apartment living and all the compromises in quality of life.

  And yeah, I enjoy telling people that I live in a van, down by the river.

 

  

  

  

Patchy Dot

 Couple of weeks ago, the kids and I took a little road trip trip / overnight camping.

  We are so lucky to live where we do, that we have so much amazing wilderness right at our back doors to explore.

  This summer I will be away for a long stretch of work to go down to my Company’s training HQ and learn to fly a new airplane. I’ve been trying to jump pack as much time with the kids as possible in preparation for being away so long. I normally go away for anywhere from 1-3 weeks at a time for my work trips. This is in trade for the equivalent amount of time at home when I’m off work, so it about evens out. Typical patterns are 10-14 days away, the three week ones aren’t as common, but occasionally I’ll pull the short straw and my work pattern will be the last two weeks of the month and then the next months schedule will start with a block of days-on, and I end up away for longer than normal. Of course, I occasionally get lucky and end up with time off at the end of one month and then time off again at the beginning of the next, so it evens out.

  Except of course when I joined this company and had to go away for three months straight to attend initial company training and my aircraft type rating and simulator training. Now, the fleet that I was on has been so slow for flying, that I finally bit the bullet and submitted a bid to change to a new aircraft. The company finally posted a vacancy bid and I ended up getting awarded a position on a new aircraft. 

Yay! Kind of. 

  I would have been happy to stay on the old aircraft, but with the slow schedule it meant that even though I was away for the same amount of time, there was less actual flying in my days away. That means less money, slower grind to proficiency on the plane and over the last two years, I actually noticed a gradual erosion of my technical skills and knowedge. Not ideal.

  Argh.

 I actually sat down and told myself I would just post a quick blog entry. Just grab a half dozen pics and bang out a quick post instead of waiting for a big block of free time to do some writing. Here I am, three paragraphs in and still trying to set the stage. Not my intent. I shorten. Less talk, more post.

  Went camping, took my little Adventure-Van-From-Japan, rounded up the short people and off we went.

  

Down the highway from our home to a little place called Pacheedaht. It’s actually a First Nations reserve along the west side of Vancouver Island.  I had never heard of it before, but they had a great little campground there on the reserve lands, just before you get into Port Renfrew. They sell freshly made fry-bread in the camp office, basically deep-fried Bannock, instead of baked….soo good. A ball of deep fried dough, nearly the size of a small child’s head, haha. They also had Barrel Cabins for overnight rent! 

  They are right on the beach on the west side of the island, so you get the Big Ocean water instead of the more relaxed waters on the east side, which sits on the protected waters of the Salish Sea, between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Most of Vancouver Islands population is situated in towns along the eastern, protected-water side of the Salish Sea / Inside Passage / Strait of Georgia, as that’s where the initial logging and fishing industries were concentrated.

  Camping spots on Vancouver Island can be hard to come by at times, particularly in the summer / tourist season. The provincial sites book up fast for reservations and the first-come sites are a huge gamble if you’re packing up gear and traveling, hoping for a place to sleep! 

 We sprang for a Barrel Cabin and it was a great choice. Comfy, warm, dry and cozy.

  You can still wilderness-camp in the actual bush on Vancouver Island, but my appetite for that kind of camping, particularly with young kids, isn’t quite as high as it was when I was younger.

  I’ve driven this stretch of road before. From Duncan, you hang a Louie and head west towards Lake Cowichan on BC Highway 19, it’s about 70? 80? Klicks from Hwy 1 where it passes through Duncan and you make the turn towards Lake Cowichan. 

  The old highway that ran from Duncan to Lake Cowichan winds its way through a couple small hamlets, but mostly rural farms and acreages. When they first settled this part of the island, it was farmland, now slowly giving way to acreages and hobby farms for retirees or monied folks from Victoria looking for quiet, rural living. Eventually the Cowichan Valley got populated enough that the “ Highway “ was filled with driveways. They built a bypass highway eventually, so now its a straight shot out to Lake Cow on one of the few highways on the island with a 100kmh speed limit or  you can still take the old highway with its scenic, meandering, slower pace.

  From Lake Cow, you head off on the highway towards Port Renfrew, which is on the west coast of Vancouver Island. At Port Renfrew, you head south, passing through Sooke and eventually all the way back down to Victoria. 

  Tofino is the more well-known tourist destination for West Coast Vancouver Island tourists.

This is off the beaten path for most people, so it’s an older highway with a lot less maintenance and services. Sometimes it still gets pressed into use as one of the only detour paths to head north “ up-island “ from Victorias only highway out, over the Malahat Summit. Very rare to see that, as it would add roughly 4 hours to that trip, but with a single choke point like the Malahat, its not unheard of either.

  The highway has a few rougher sections, but there’s very little traffic and we saw a multitude of rough-camping “ sites “ along the highway at a couple little lakes and pretty much every time the highway crossed a bridge there were informal camp sites on both sides of the bridge landings. There are a couple of provincial campsites along this stretch as well, but I suspect during tourist season you will need to book well in advance to get a spot, but I could be wrong!

 More summer adventures to come, but first I need to finish up the new aircraft type training course, then enjoy some time off with kids before I head back out on the “ road “.

Trip Report LAX-ICN-TPE-LAX

 

  Ok, here goes nothing. This is my first attempt at a trip report. I have to be vague about certain details on purpose to leave my employer out of it as I’m sure I’ve made several written promises not to post anything to social media about details of our business. 

** PostScript -  Ok, so I recognize that I have a tendency to wander off topic. It’s been pointed out to me before and I have noticed it myself as well. Sometimes I get engrossed in telling a story, be it in person or on paper and I always come up on details that I feel need explaining in order to make the story make sense or have the context that I think it’s important. It would appear that it’s more important to me than it is to most other people. That being said, it’s how I would tell a story to someone in person, so it’s kind of how it comes out when I’m trying to do it in this media as well. Thought about making a substantive effort to change that, but for now I’ve decided not to. Enjoy your trips off into the weeds as I try to tell a story.

  I got tired and went to bed after writing most of this particular entry and came back to it the next morning. Several pages of rambling about scheduling and lines and I have barely left home on what was supposed to be a trip report for a week in Asia.  I contemplated simply making this two separate entries, one for relating how scheduling works at my current employer and another for the actual trip report, problem solved. Except I make reference to the specific trip all through my scheduling ramble, so that would mean a bunch of editing for continuity’s sake. Heck that. Deal with it. Still going to break it up into two separate entries though.

**

  This particular trip started with several Deadhead positioning flights before I ever actually operated any flights as flight crew.

   On this particular month, I was working a schedule of Days-on, which I bid for a month ahead of time.

Once a month, the company puts out a list of Trip Pairings, Reserve Lines and Duty Lines. Trip Pairings are where they will post the actual trips that you would be operating. If you really wanted to go to Istanbul, let’s say, you might bid on a line just because it had an Istanbul flight on it. Our business is notoriously fluid, so its kind of a running joke here that bidding like that is just asking for trouble as what they plan on happening 30 days out doesn’t always resemble what actually happens when the time comes.  

  Trip Pairing lines will have the whole block of days-on filled in with operating flights, positioning deadhead flights, layover periods and mandatory rest periods filled in for the whole block. A lot of guys like these lines as you know where you are going to be and what days you’ll have “ off “ while on the road. In theory, you could plan to have your partner fly out to Hawaii, say, and time it with a long layover or Rest Period and enjoy some holiday time together during your work week. This is a bit of a pipe dream as a Trip Pairing holding up for your entire schedule is a tad on the optimistic side.  

  A Reserve Line is a block of days-on for the month, possibly several separate blocks, where you will go to a certain city and sit there as a Reserve Crew Member. If a scheduled flight is delayed enough that the crew times-out, or there is a sick call, fatigue call, they might call a reserve guy in that city and you’d get “ activated “ for that flight.

  Reserve Lines will usually come with a block of 12-hour times associated with them as well. These are the times you are On Call essentially. During those times you are expected to be downstairs in the Hotel Lobby, dressed and ready for pickup within 90 minutes of activation. You’re not necessarily stuck in the hotel all day, or all night, whichever the case may be, but I think most guys plan any activities within fairly short range of the hotel during their Duty Period. I use an hour as the furthest I’d venture afield during an on-call period. If I had to race back, pack up and be downstairs ready to go, I could do it in 90 Minutes. That being said, we can also look at our companies flight tracking program and see what is actually happening with flights in your city and get a good idea if you stand a chance at getting called out. The other time you might get activated is if a flight crew member calls in sick for a flight, or worse, at the time of the “ wake-up “ call which we receive 1 hour prior to the Van Show-Time. I’ve had reserve assignments where there is literally no aircraft on the CONTINENT that I’m sitting reserve in, let alone the city. Now, before I’d go do something silly like venturing further afield than an hour or worse, there is always the possibility that the call from Scheduling isn’t to activate you for a live-flight, but to position you instead to another city for an assignment. In that case, they may have a commercial flight in mind that they need you to be on and that flight may require you to be dressed and downstairs at the 90 minute mark, so you still have to be cautious with using the flight board.  I wont get into the specifics as its complicated and probably a good subject for a post of its own, but reserve lines pay better than the other lines. In general, they’re not really that well liked by most of the guys I talk to, myself included, but the increase in pay for a month of reserve duty is not insignificant.  

  One of the reasons I don’t like reserve lines is that you rarely get called. It kind of feels like the crew schedulers will move heaven and earth to avoid activating a reserve crew member. I kind of get it, I guess, once your reserve is gone, there’s no one left! Basically though, it usually means a week or two being on duty and not really doing anything. Some of the places we go have tons to see and do within an hour of the hotel. Other places, not so much. If you don’t plan it out, it can feel a little like sitting in prison. Luckily, I usually build myself a routine that I can fill my day, even in the most mundane of duty assignments. Breakfast, walk, gym, study, lunch, local activity, grocery shopping, supper, movie, bedtime. Lather, rinse, repeat, sometimes for 17 days… The other reason I’m not fond of Reserve duty is that if you don’t get called out, which is more often than not, then you’re that much closer to falling out of recency and earning yourself a trip back to the Training Center to get recurrent with your takeoffs and landings. At this level of Aviation that I am committing, part 121 and part 117 of the US system, we need to have done 3 takeoffs and landings within the last 90 days in order to be current. 

  When I started here we did a lot of short-haul flights on my fleet, and staying current was a non-issue. Nowadays though, most of our work is long haul and it’s quite easy to expire. With the long haul flights, anything more than 8 hours, we typically fly with Augmented crews, that is, more pilots on board than we need in order to have relief pilots so the operating crew can take a rest break. It also means that only 1 out of the 4 of us on board is getting a landing for our currency…

  The last type of schedule you can bid on is what I’m calling Days-on. There’s actually another name for it, but I suspect its very company-specific and would likely out my employer, so I’ll leave it at that.  This schedule is simply a block of Days On Duty, or occasionally two smaller blocks, within the month. 48 hours prior to your first day-on, they will fill in your schedule with your first assignment, if there is one. If there isn’t one, then 48 hours ahead of your first day-on, you are given that first day off. You’d then continue to check your schedule each day during a specific 1-hours window of time until you are given an assignment and on your way, or your days on duty run out and you ended up staying at home the entire time and not doing anything. The not doing anything is fairly rare, but it does happen. More often that not, Especially on the fleet I am on, as we are a little slower than the other fleets, you’ll get between 1 and 4 days “ off “ that were originally planned as days on duty. These are Award Days, when they don’t have an assignment for you and you stay home or you get sent home a day or two early as they have nothing else for you to do. Also typical is that once you get sent out on the road for an assignment, you’ll end up staying out on the road, they will use you first before they pull someone else away from home and your schedule will slowly fill in as you go, or it will get populated full right from the start. Often if a crew member calls in sick from home and they have a Line of assigned flights, they will pull someone from a Days-On line and just give you the sick callers entire schedule.

  Different people like different types of pairings depending on a host of reasons, so you can’t really say that one type of line goes to the senior bidders more often, it kind of varies. Often the senior guys needs change for a typical month and what you thought would go super senior ends up going to the junior bidders, and vice versa as well. I mean, yeah, a trip going to Venice, Italy, with a 5 day layover is pretty much guaranteed to be a senior trip, but you just never know.  That’s one of the things I really do like about working for this company, based on our customers and our business model, a fluid and dynamic schedule is pretty much the only thing that’s really consistent!

  Anyhoo, back to the trip report. 

  I kind of wanted to explain the scheduling part a little as it’s relevant to this trip in a way. Mostly because  it used to be a regular run for us and it also used to bid really senior. It happened in this case to be over the Christmas-New Years holiday week and all of the senior guys avoided it as it had you away from home over the holidays.

  I have young kids at home and try to be home for Holidays as best I can, but in all honesty, Christmas has always been a very big deal for my Ex Wife and she usually requests to have the kids over the actual Christmas dates. I have never been really tied to holidays, so I’m more than happy to do my Christmas with the kids on an arbitrary date, before or after the 25th, so it usually works out for everyone. In this case I ended up getting a senior trip, starting from LAX and having me home 8 days or so later, with stops in Incheon, Korea, Taipei, Taiwan, Nagoya, Japan and eventually back to Los Angeles.

  One of the things with US Airline flying is that you have a “ base “ where all your trips start from. Legally, the company is required to have you back at base at the end of your trip(s) in order to release you into days off. This can get a little complicated with their scheduling as it means that if the actual flying part of your assignment doesn’t end up back in your base ( it rarely does ) then they have to leave enough time at the end of your assignments to move you back to base in time to release you on-time, or pay significant overtime. This will often mean that even though you end up in say, Nagoya, Japan with three days left on your schedule, they can’t really assign you anything other than moving you back to “ base “ as their isn’t enough time left to do an assignment and then a commercial deadhead back to base. I think my Base at the time was Los Angeles, which is why the trip started and ended there. 

  I also live in Canada, nowhere near my Base, so there is also the matter of getting me to and from Home to actually start my pattern. Quite common with other companies that also operate like we do, is that the company allows us to live wherever we want and they will provide commercial airline tickets to and from our assignments. When I say wherever we want, I mean it, we have pilots that live all over the world. Regular airlines don’t do this, their pilots need to get themselves to and from their Base, both on their own schedule and on their own dime. As Pilots, we can “ jump seat” for free with other airlines, but this is on a standby basis and can be a little nerve wracking, when not getting to work on-time might be the end of your employment.. Not for us though, we get a positive space ticket, although we do need to travel to and from work on our days off, which can eat into those days a bit depending on where you choose to live. The rules around the purchase of that ticket are fairly complex as well, in terms of time frames, class of service as well as total costs. The rules for the tickets to and from Home are different from the tickets they buy you to move you around within your pattern. Home Tickets are always Coach, whereas Deadhead tickets can often be in Business or First Class depending on the length of the deadhead flight or the destination. The international business class tickets in particular can be very, very pricey. I think the most expensive ticket that I have been purchased was to move me from Tokyo to Vancouver, BC in Business Class. Total price? Almost 9000 CAD. Yikes.

  That being said, there is a lot of effort made by the company to utilize the “ Siupernumerary Seats “ that all of our freighter aircraft have. These are essentially seats that can be used by people other than the Flight Crew. People like Mechanics or Loadmasters that might be riding along, or customer representatives for special cargo and of course, on most of our flights, fellow company pilots being shuffled around the world in a way that wont bankrupt our operation. Some of our aircraft even have bunks. There are only two bunks though and are obviously reserved for the operating crew. Occasionally though, you’ll get moved on an aircraft that has bunks and only a 3-man crew operating it. Since two of them have to be up front at all times, only one is resting at any given time, so the other bunk is available for us hitchhikers in the back, which can be very very nice.

  What will happen a lot of the time is that you’ll get positioned somewhere, like LA in this case, to catch a ride on a freighter going to Incheon. From Incheon then they’ll move you to your actual assignment on a commercial passenger flight, also business class, but a much shorter and cheaper leg, like Incheon to Tokyo. Travelling in First Class is very nice, its one of the perks of this job that are fiercely protected by our union and quite honestly, if the perk didn’t exist, I think a lot of our pilots would go elsewhere. It makes a big part of the job, commercial deadheading, go from a miserable experience to one that you can actually look forward to. There are practical reasons for the luxury travel as well, not just pilots enjoying the experience. When you’re being shuffled around the world its hard enough to keep up with the time-zone jet lag fatigue without throwing a 10 or 12 hour economy flight in there.

  That being said, in this case, my assignment was operating a run we did that went from Incheon to Taipei to Nagoya to Incheon. We called it The Rice Run. In order to get into position, I had to fly from Victoria, BC down to Los Angeles on a commercial flight. I’d arrive in LA, stay overnight and then a late night departure the next day on a company plane to Incheon. Once in Incheon I had a day and a half of mandatory rest in order to get “ Theater Acclimated “.

  There are complicated rules as to how many hours I can work in a day with a sliding scale that reduces that number of available hours based on the timing of the flights departure. A lot of our Cargo flights operate over night, which reduces the number of hours we can legally operate even further. There are even more rules that specify how many hours you can be used for if you are coming from a different time zone. In this case, with the night flights and the multiple time zones difference from my home-base, they had to “ acclimate “ you to increase the number of hours to where you’d be able to legally accomplish these flights. Acclimating you to a new time zone and removing the restrictions to your duty times simply means giving you a long rest period so you can get over your jet lag. In this case I think I started my trip with a 40 hour layover in Incheon after arrival, before my first duty period. So, a day to get to LA, a days layover there, 12 hours to ICN, two days layover there, making it almost 5 days from leaving home before I operated my first leg. 

I’ll rewind it a bit. Leaving Victoria for LA meant I had to first take a short flight to Vancouver as there is no direct service to LA from Victoria. Vic to Van is a quick 20 minute flight on a Dash-8 aircraft which I’m not very fond of, for different reasons. One of those reasons is that my luggage that I cart around the world doesn’t fit well in the overhead bins on that aircraft. In fact, my Rolly bag doesn’t fit at all. I could check a bag, but I hate doing that as the consequence of losing my luggage is pretty severe as I probably am not staying in the city I am flying too, so there isn’t enough time for the airline to recover my bags and get them to me if they get lost. With the amount of airline traveling that I do, they also wouldn’t survive the physical handling by their bag smashers to be honest. I’d be buying new bags every couple of months. 

   For the Dash-8 flight to Vancouver, when I have to take it, my strategy is to just shamelessly bribe the crew with chocolate in order to use the Crew Closet up front where I know it will fit.  Technically, as long as I’m travelling in Uniform, I am permitted to use the crew closet but it’s not a very common request and not all the Air Canada staff know about their policy. For the very infrequent times that I need it, I find its easier to just buy a swanky bag a chocolate and offer it to the flight attendant when I board, in exchange for closet space. I’ve never been refused :)

  Off to Vancouver for a brief layover before I catch my flight to LA. I didn’t have airline status back then, so I couldn’t use the lounge in between flights, but I think it was only 2 hours or so to wait. Much nicer when you have lounge access and a nice place to sit and some food and drink, but so be it. 

  One problem that does come up with all the first class airline travel is how much it wrecks the experience of coach travel. I’m not even kidding. Before I came to work here I had never travelled in anything other than Economy and had no issues with it really, still enjoyed and looked forward to traveling by air. Now that I’ve tasted the good life up in the front cabin, it makes it that much harder to sit in the back, haha.

  On the flight down to LA I reviewed our handy dandy Station guide, which gives us all the details of any city in the world that we operate into or out of, wether it be by commercial airline or an operating flight. Which is pretty much everywhere. Each cities entry will have everything you need to know as far as local transportation providers, station employees names and numbers, if we have any employees there. It also lists our hotels that we use, local customs peculiarities and a bunch of other info. On it, I can find out where the designated pickup spot for our Limo / ground transportation will be, often with maps and pictures of the waiting areas. I’ll also get an email at some point, confirming that local transportation to the hotel has been arranged and what time they are expecting me.  I know, it seemed kinda princess-y to me as well when I first started here. Being whisked around by limo’s to upscale hotels and first class travel, haha. Often the “ Limo “ is a hotel shuttle driven by amateur race car drivers with substance abuse issues so its not all glitz and glamour! 

  Often times when I deadhead around, I’ll travel in uniform. Some of the guys do and some of the guys wont do that unless it’s mandated. There’s a lot of Airline Flight Crew members specific line ups for Security, Customs or passport control in different countries and a lot of them mandate that you need to be in Uniform to make use of them. Travelling by commercial airline for the purposes of operating a flight somewhere else counts as being “ on duty “ for a lot of these crew shortcuts, but only if you’re in uniform. I find it makes customs a heck of a lot easier as well. When I travel outside of work, I’m used to being grilled at times with standard Customs questions, where are you going? Where are you staying? How long? How much money did you bring, that kind of thing. In uniform as flight crew, it’s usually hello, welcome, goodbye, next.

  Obviously there is some downside though as well. You do get a little more attention from the travelling public in the airport itself at times. I kind of enjoy the looks from little kids and try to smile and talk to them a little bit when I get the chance, I remember that feeling of seeing a pilot in uniform as a kid. Occasionally you do get a little unwanted attention, but it’s never really malicious, more annoying if anything. The odd person will ask you for airport directions, I usually tell them I’m lost too! One time I was standing in an early morning line up at the terminal Starbucks and one of the cashiers came out from behind the counter and escorted me to the head of the line, haha. I suspect they’ve been tipped well in the past by some crews on a short turnaround who came into the terminal to grab some much needed caffeine and paid the staff in advance for the privilege that I got, so thanks guys :) You also can’t go into a lounge, where alchohol is served, in uniform. Or into an airport bar, or order drinks on the plane either. I don’t drink much these days, so it hardly cramps my style, but when I do want to use the lounge, I have to find somewhere to get changed before I go in. For awhile it was awkward and unpleasant bathroom stalls, but I’ve since found that the Family rooms at most airports, with baby-change tables to be quite handy for getting changed in a more civilized fashion. Sorry moms and dads.

  Just the other day, my flight was delayed and I had planned in changing into civvies once I got through customs, and go to the lounge for my breakfast while waiting for my connecting flight. My incoming flight was so delayed that I had to dash straight to my connecting flight and had no opportunity to change. The next flight was a 5 hour flight in first class, which I almost always try to be out of uniform for. I can enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner and sleep in the comfy chairs a lot better when not wearing a shirt and tie. No dice on this one as I didn’t have a chance to get changed. Also had to endure a few side-eyes from the boarding economy passengers as they filed past you in first class. Some frequent flyers look forward to their upgrades that you get with airline status, and there have been rumblings that they have been “ cheated “ out of their loyalty rewards by some airlines increasing their contract benefits these days to their pilots by giving those seats to pilots being deadheaded around. One boomer-ish fellow even made a comment, jokingly, but still awkward “ oooh, first class, you guys are spoiled! “ Jerk. Anyways.

Sometimes they are hotel shuttles, other times, they are actually, “ limos “. Sort of. When I hear Limo, I think 1980s stretched limos with leather seats and the widow to the driver compartment that rolls up and down with a button, and scotch in glasses that pops out the console. Haven’t had one of those yet, usually it’s just a large black Cadillac Escalade type SUV.

  Off to the designated Hotel in LA, about a 15 minute drive from the airport. Get checked in, changed and go for a walk around the neighborhood to stretch my legs a bit. Mostly urban California strip malls, so not a ton to see or do really. I find quite a few cities in the states to be much more car-centric than other places in the world. Life as a pedestrian down here is a tough one. Definitely notice the lack of parks, public green spaces and honestly, even sidewalks, as compared to a lot of places. 

 Not much to do the next day, so I just took it easy around the hotel. Got a work out in the gym, followed by a quick swim in the pool. Chat with the kids on the phone. 

  Next day was my flight, in the evening, and it was Christmas Eve. 

  This was my deadhead flight over to ICN, but instead of commercial aircraft and first class luxury, it was in the upper deck of a 747 freighter. Not quite as luxurious, but honestly, I have no complaints for long transoceanic flights in the freighter, especially the 74. The whole upper deck in addition to the flight deck portion, is basically a small apartment with a half dozen business class style seats, two small rooms with bunks, a galley and a bathroom. The galley is fully stocked with hot meals, drinks, sandwiches and snacks, coffee and tea, juices, milk and usually some fruit. Being waited on hand and foot is nice and all on commercial flights, but there’s also something to just being able to get up and get yourself a meal when you want and not having to deal with any of the other passengers as well. 

  Typically, on the freighter, once we’ve taken off and get up to cruise, everyone changes out of uniform and into their Cruise Clothes. Slippers, sweatpants and a Tshirt. Before top of Descent on the other side, everyone takes turns getting changed back into uniform, but it’s very casual up there, which is nice. No inflight entertainment, so hopefully you remembered to download a few movies or books for your kindle before you left the coast!

  Since we departed at night on Christmas Eve, the 24th of December, it was well past midnight and into the 25th by the time we got to the International Date line in the middle of the pacific. By the time we landed, it was December 26th. I technically didn’t work Christmas at all, I skipped right over it!

  12 hours later-ish,I don’t actually remember the exactly length of the flight, but its a fairly long one, we arrived in Incheon, Korea. Incheon is a suburb of Seoul where the large airport is. A lot of the large cargo carriers, be they stand-alone freight haulers or the cargo division of a passenger airline, use ICN as an Asian hub. It’s fairly central and there is a ton of exports that come out of South Korea as well, particularly to the USA. From ICN they’ll fly their freighters to the major US hubs of Chicago, LA, New York, Dallas, etc. Most of the long haul aircraft on these routes can’t quite make it direct to destination, depending on the winds aloft, so there is usually an intermediate stop enroute. Anchorage has become pretty much the defacto stop for everyone running these routes. It’s about half-way and has the airport infrastructure to support all these large cargo planes. 

  Being the transit hub for these flights is a fairly lucrative business for an airport. I know of two airports in Canada that tried taking a run at getting in on this business, but as far as I know, neither of them really made any headway in taking any of it away from Anchorage. However, if you’re looking for a transit stop in Canada for your Freighter Aircraft, to take on fuel and fresh flight crew, both Prince George, BC ( CYXS ) and Winnipeg, MB ( CYWG ) would welcome your business, haha! 

  I always found it a little comical when I used to fly into Prince George for a previous employer. They have a 12,000 Foot runway ( suitable for a fully loaded 747 ) ,  runway centerline lighting and a massive cargo stand at one end of the airport. It is completely out of place for the little town of less than 80,000 people to have this kind of an airport. In fact, I think the airports in Canada that have centreline lighting on their runways is, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and …. Prince George.

  Arriving in ICN, the four flight crew and the three of us deadheading in the back, are met at the plane by our local handler and escorted through arrival proceedings. This is pretty standard most of the places we go to around the world, and generally follows the same script. The handler shows up with a van and we pile in for the trip from our remote cargo stand, to the terminal or customs hall. From there we are led through the terminal and through crew-only lanes going through passport control and customs. The handler will stay with us to act as a translator and to make sure we don’t wander off and get lost. Coming in from a long-haul flight we are usually a little on the bedraggled side, bleary-eyed and not as sharp as you might expect. This is a bit of a generalization, but there is a little bit of Cargo-Pilot ethos that still hangs around us, where we might not be as sharp looking in terms of uniforms and appearance as our passenger carrying colleagues. Management is working hard at stamping out the Freight-Dog side of our reputations, but I think a lot of guys still wear it as a badge of honor. Maybe a little more stubble than normal, maybe a couple extra stickers on our flight bags, or badges/patches on our uniform jackets. Maybe… like I say, they’re working hard on removing that, so they are disappearing fast.

  In ICN it’s a quick, efficient and seamless process. Passport control is almost all automated. Passports inserted in a machine and scanned, fingers on the scanner for fingerprint verification of ID, picture taken of your face, presumably with a facial recognition component. I don’t even remember if the customs officer asked any questions or if was similarly automated with a nothing-to-declare button push.

  On the other side, we’re released into the general population of the airport terminal and our handler whisks us through the terminal to the street, where our van and driver are waiting for us. I believe we arrived in the wee hours of the morning, so the terminal was mostly empty. We tend to come and go through these airports in the off-hours that the passenger airlines don’t want to subject their “cargo” to, but our boxes don’t care.

  Another half hour or so on the quiet highways and expressways leading from ICN airport into Seoul and we arrive at our hotel in the modern suburb of Incheon. 

  Seoul itself is a massive city, one of the biggest cities I’ve flown into. The suburb of Incheon is built on a lot of reclaimed land along the shore, consisting of row after row of modern high rise apartments. Sadly, I haven’t explored much of Seoul yet, most of my wandering have been in the general area of our hotel in Incheon itself.

  Our hotel is used by a few different airline crews, both cargo and passenger, but is also a very well-known luxury hotel for tourists as well. 

  Sadly, we have had a few instances of poorly behaved crews, some of them stubbornly clinging to the FreightDog personality, that we’ve come close to being asked to take our ( considerable ) business elsewhere more than a couple times since I started here.

  Some of the stories I have heard is mostly due to poor behavior by the crews around the breakfast service. When it comes to the 4 and 5 star hotels in a lot of countries I have been to, the breakfast service is a quite swanky affair. If you are a high end tourist or a local taking a luxury break, the breakfast buffet is akin to an evening formal dinner in some of these places. This hotel in particular has an incredible Buffett. Row after row of high end Asian and western dishes, delicacies lined up in endless quantity and variety and often a dedicated chef or two at different stations preparing custom dishes.  Stories of our guys wandering down in their housecoats and slippers, wearing their undershirt from the day before and a pair of sweat pants, alongside a Korean couple celebrating their honeymoon in formal wear. Stories of guys bringing Tupperware containers to fill so that they don’t have to spend their per-diems later in the day. I think at one point it got bad enough that we were banished to a completely different floor serving basic offerings, out of the public view. Enough guys were pissed at losing this perk and a bit of internal “ guidance “ was done by the union and once promises were made to reign in our professional image, we have been allowed to return. Its still pretty obvious when you walk in the dining hall, who is crew and who is not, but its not nearly as bad as it was, so I hear.

  The dining room itself is on the 60th? Floor with what you imagine are pretty spectacular views of the city. The very top floor has a lounge with similar views. The hotel itself actually starts on the 20th floor, with the floors below it being a mix of apartments, shops and offices. The underground car parkade actually connects to a mall with a Grocery store and various other shops. If you keep going through the underground warren, I “ think “ it finally connects to the subway line. I haven’t tried to navigate to the subway through the underground, but I did walk on the surface streets to it and it’s only a couple of blocks away.

  Right across the street from the hotel is a large park, Central Park. I was there in the winter, so a lot of it was closed for the season, but it appears to be a fairly large park, modeled after Central Park in NYC.

  I always find it fascinating, how they mix the shops, offices and apartments in ways that you just don’t see in North America. What mighty look like a standard office building on the outside, might have a pub on the 7th floor, sandwiched between a chiropractors office and a retail shop selling rice cookers.

  I have a friend who I had worked for in Vancouver who moved to Seoul a few years back, so I let him know I was in town for 48 hours-ish and we made plans to meet up and go out for dinner. He is an aviation buff, so it was fun to catch up, not having seen him much since I started on this new job, so lots to catch up on and nerd out over airplanes. Of course, in Korea, there’s no shortage of Korean BBQ places, which, as you might guess are just called ‘ BBQ places “. There were so many of them in fact that it took us a while to find one we liked. In fact I think we ended up eating at two different places, after realizing the first one we picked was a little on the expensive side.

  He lives in Seoul itself, so he took the train to come out to Incheon to see me. I had actually made an attempt earlier in the day to get on the train and go into the city and see Old Seoul as opposed to the modern suburb of Incheon. At the time, I didn’t have a data plan for my cell phone, so I was stuck using the company phone for Google Maps and navigation. It wasn’t very helpful to be honest and I was loathe to install anything like Google Lense or other helpful apps, so I struggled a bit. In fact, I got as far as navigating myself to the train station and confronted with the machines and maps not having any English and no way to translate them, ended up giving up. I was being pretty optimistic about trying to shoe-horn a sightseeing adventure into my day and was already second guessing my plan when it started to fall apart in the train station, so I look at it as more of a change in plans than defeat.

  After he went home, I went back to the hotel to try and get onto a proper sleep schedule. 

  The next day I spent just walking around the area and exploring, There are a ton of shops and actually a fairly extensive network of walking trails along the river that runs through Incheon. It was winter, so not a lot of tourists around and it was a little on the chilly side for the walking as well. Honestly though, even the most mundane of activities in any Asian city can be an adventure as there is just so many things that are different from back home. Even a trip to the store for milk can be an adventure!

  Food wise I’ve always enjoyed the Asian convenience stores as well. The local 7/11, Family Mart or Lawsons will have selections of foods and drinks that are nothing like you’d find in North America. I recall from my time living in Japan that you could literally eat all of your meals out of a 7/11 and you could actually get relatively healthy food. The “ Salartyman “ culture of working 12 hour days and commuting home on the train made it necessary for them to offer actual food at these 24 hour shops instead of just prepackaged crap. Sure, you can get the crap too, but there is a market for people to want to pick up an actual meal as a convenience item.

  The next evening was my operating flight over to Taipei, Taiwan. I’d be “ based “ out of Taipei for a couple of days while I operated the Taipei to Nagoya round trip flight one night and then a return flight from Taipei to Incheon to conclude my operating legs for this trip. After that it was just deadhead flights to get me back to LA and released into days-off.

  ICN airport itself is pretty cool, a definite pleasure to fly out of. My Asian flying hasn’t been extensive enough to pretend like I’ve seen it all, but from my limited time over here so far, most of the controllers English isn’t too bad. Since for the most part I know what to expect them to say at different points of our interaction, it’s easier to cut through the accents. Proper phraseology is critical over here and using slang or colloquial speech over the radio will not work out very well for you, as they’re operating on the same principle, knowing what you’re expected to say to them goes a long way in their understanding of our accents as well.

  I really enjoyed taxiing around at ICN airport. Once you get your taxi clearance, a lot of the times it will just be “ follow the orange line “ and they will light up your taxi path with different coloured lights inset into the pavement! How cool is that?

  In Taipei, I had 24 hours off after arrival, followed by a night flight, then another 24 hours off before my last flight, so a decent amount of time for playing tourist as well. This run used to include one other destination and it made the rest periods “ min-rest “ as opposed to the very gentlemanly 24 hours between operating flights.

  I really enjoyed the Taipei layover as our hotel was right in downtown instead of the suburbs, so all of the tourist activities were right outside your front door. The hotel was equally swanky as well. In fact, there was a full size bottle of wine waiting for me on the table in my room.

  Taipei and its older downtown core was a lot more conducive to a day spent just walking around and taking it all in. Instead of modern sprawl, everything was jam packed on top of each other. The streets are a warren of 5 and 10 stores buildings as far as you can see. Signs on the upper floors advertise bars on the 5F, shopping stores on the 3F and restaurants everywhere.

  Our hotel was only a block or trio away from Taipei 101, the giant modern skyscraper that you can’t miss. It is 101 storeys high and built in a “ pagoda “ style. I missed the New Years fireworks by only a day or two, where they fire the fireworks off the sides of the skyscraper, I’m told its quire the show.

  I ventured up top for the the viewing deck, on the very top. 

Aside from the views, they also have a room built into the middle with a giant metal ball. Signs tell you that it’s what’s used to keep the building from swaying too much in the wind or in an earthquake. The ball is balanced and suspended, moved from side to side by motors and computers that sense the buildings sway and move the counterweight accordingly to dampen it out.

  Had my lunch in a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop that served up delicious noodles to the lunchtime business crowd. I had a small shopping bag of souvenirs for myself and the kids, that I forgot on the counter where I had devoured my noodles. After I left, it took me almost 20 minutes to realize I had forgotten the bag. I didn’t hold out much hope that it would still be there by the time I got back, but sure enough, it was waiting for me right where I left it!

  It’s hard to avoid getting sucked into the souvenir trap when I’m on the road. There is so much marketing all around you, trying to liberate tourists from their dollars. I realized pretty quick with this job that I’d go broke pretty quick if I started bringing home piles of souvenirs on every trip. I try to stick to fridge magnets and keychains for myself and the kids, they’re widely available, even in airport gift shops, which is sometimes the only place I visit in a new country! They’re also easy to pack and wont break the bank. Once you start down the path of buying souvenirs, there  is no turning back, and then there’s the guilt of missing someone in your attempt to bring something back for everyone. I remember this from Japan, the culture of “ Omiyage “, but over there it was pretty much mandatory, not optional to bring something back for everyone. Luckily, being a practical people, in all the train stations and airport gift shops you will find stores and stalls selling boxes of pastries or snacks, in bundles of 10, 20 or 30 individually wrapped pieces, so you could buy one box and hit everyone on your list.

  Later that night it was an all-night “ turn “, a cargo flight from Taipei, over to Nagoya Japan and then sit in the plane for a couple hours while they unloaded us and reloaded for the return trip to Taipei. The next day in Taipei was a little more subdued as far as sightseeing since I had to day-sleep to get over the all-nighter and prepare for the next evenings flight as well.

  Depending on who you’re flying with, you may or may not have company for dinner or tourist activities. Some guys like to hang out, while others just like to head to their room and spend their downtime relaxing solo. I go through phases where I’ll be sociable and other times where I’d just as soon do my own thing. Sometimes when I’m out in a new country I like the freedom of just going where I want to go and not worrying about someone else. Other times it’s nice to have someone with you who has been before and knows the hotspots. Of course, it all depends on personality as well, you’re not gauranteed to get along outside the cockpit as well. The people who immediately retreat to their rooms and don’t make an effort to socialize at all, ever, are sometimes called “ Slam Clickers “. The SLAM of the hotel room door, followed by the CLICK of the door lock.

  Our company has a mix of passenger and cargo flying on the fleet that I am on. With the passenger flights, the crews will typically be 2-4 pilots and up to a dozen cabin crew as well. If you’re the sociable type, there’s enough people to find your tribe and hang out. In the freighter ops, there’s usually just the 2 of us, sometimes 4, and that can make for a lot less variety in personalities and more potential for you to be out there on your own.

  After an early evening supper and a pre-duty nap, it was back to the airport for the operating flight back to Incheon. From ICN it was another day off while I waited for the departing company freighter that would take me back to LAX and finish my trip. 

  Back to LAX it was the same routine in the upstairs “ suite “ of the 747 freighter, watching movies, eating, reading and sleeping in my chair. On ce back in LA, we gathered our things and headed to the local hotel. The aircraft is always well stocked with food and I’ve found I need to practice a lot of self restraint to avoid being lured into the trap of free calories. While I’m on the “road” for work, I get paid a per-diem to account for the fact that I don’t have a kitchen at most hotels and will end up eating out of restaurants a lot.

  If a person can manage to cadge enough free calories between hotel breakfasts and airplane catering, that per-diem money can add up to little extra income at the end of the month. It’s a dangerous game though as most free food isn’t typically very good for you, or even very good at all. The airplane catering is hit or miss, as it’s contracted out to a local provider at each of the places we fly into, the quality can vary pretty wildly. Some stations are renowned for their catering…in a good way… and others are more on the infamous side. Luckily, most of the hotels that we are put up at also have gyms, so you can balance out the forces of evil acting on your body. I’ve never intentionally taken catering food off the airplane on ny of the international flying we do, as it’s almost universally forbidden by most countries customs regulations. Domestic flights aren’t subject to the same rules. When we used to do a lot of domestic flying, I actually included a soft-side lunch bag in my flight gear that I would load up before leaving the plane to tide me over at least a “free” lunch at the layover hotel.

  One more night at the hotel in LA and then next morning I had a van-ride on my schedule to whisk me off to the airport and my flight back home.

  8 Days on the road. 17 days a month is a typical work schedule, however, if you worked till the end of one month, and you were unlucky in your bidding, your next schedule could, in theory, begin with another 17 day stretch, taking you to 34 days on the road. Luckily, you can select an option to not allow the awarding of back to back lines like that right in our bidding software. 

  Well, there it is, the first trip report in the books!