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Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

Home Again

After an uneventful trip – 19 hours door to door – we are home in Seattle!

Melissa is super excited as she has been writing a few articles and submitting them to sailing magazines.  Today she got word from SAIL (one of the two largest sailing magazines in the world) that they want to publish an article she wrote.  Once it becomes published she will publish the link to the article.

The most interesting part of the trip was in Miami where they have a new immigration system.  You go to a kiosk – similar to an airline check-in kiosk, and have your passport scanned.  They know what flight you arrived on, take a photograph of you, and you answer the standard questions about where you have been and what you were doing.  Then the kiosk prints a ticket with your passport info and picture.  Then you take that and your passport to an immigration officer who stamps everything.  Super efficient and we were through immigration in a matter of minutes.  Of course in the end it’s not clear this gets you through any faster since you still have to wait for your bags to clear customs.  So it was over an hour before we were sitting comfortably and drinking a glass of white wine in the American Airlines lounge.  (We booked business class tickets on the oodles of miles we had piled up on Alaska Airlines.)  None the less, we love the idea that the government is starting to use technology to reduce labor costs.  We had a debate over whether the kiosks (or their back end system) was actually using facial recognition to compare to the photo on the chip embedded in our passports or not.  They must be at least approaching capability to do that, and potentially eliminate the human factor all together.  Because let’s face it, Dave today looks nothing like (to a human) the photo in his passport.  But his bone structure would still be a match.  He does look happier in his chair on the boat, eh?

Due to thunderstorms our flight was late coming into Seattle and hence the pick up lanes outside baggage claim were crammed with cars.  Many people parking and waiting for people who had been delayed.  Everyone knows you aren't supposed to park but keep driving around or wait at the cell phone lot.  But it was one of those things where the traffic was so bad that no one wanted to drive around again because it took so long, so people would park, thereby making the mess even worse.  One woman went berserk and started screaming at drivers, getting in their faces over the hoods of cars, "you can't park here", "move along people", "no one wants you here!"  Ok, we came home to civilization cuz why?

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