Traveling through Tartarus (Aka LAX Hell and other places)

MFT: I arrived and my luggage
LFP: Traveling

Hello! So I’ve ended up having a 40 hour day (Jan. 31st) of which most of it was spent traveling. So we spent the morning finishing up some fieldwork (see previous post) and then the afternoon packing and getting to the airport. Finally at the airport we managed to get through check-in and sit at the lounge waiting to board to United Airlines flight. This then commenced for a very long and uncomfortable plane ride of 5 hours to Hawaii. We left at like 8:30 pm Maj time on the 31st and arrived around 2:30 am Hawaii time on the 31st. Aka, we arrived in the middle of the night (urgh). Then we got to wait at the airport in Hawaii from 2:30 am till 7:00 am (when our flights left). So much fun! The airport was pretty shut down till about 5:00 am when we had to take all of our luggage (URGH) and put it through the xray machines for the US agriculture inspection. Luckily that didn’t take long it was just a pain having to load all of our luggage on/off various places. Then we dropped it all off and walked through security.

Hawaii was less bad than expected, but I didn’t get much sleep. Then I separated for my flight to LAX while the rest of the group flew to San Francisco. We took a final group photo in one of those photo-booths to commemorate the fieldwork. The very silly photo is now in lab. My flight to LAX was long, all 8 hours of it. I kind of slept for a bit. I then arrived in LAX and got to go grab all of my stuff at 1:30 pm local time. Here was the best bit, I had to wait around LAX with 4 bags all at 50 lbs plus my carryon of about 30 lbs till 8 pm when I could finally check in to Air Tahiti Nui. Of course almost all the food options and fun stuff is inside security in the LAX airport so I got to sit on the floor charging my various electronics for 7 hours waiting to walk through. I had too much stuff to really walk around with and I couldn’t really sleep since I was alone. Anyways, it took a while and I read mostly. During check-in I managed to find the other SEA students! That was pretty awesome cause then I could easily join them for getting to the boat etc. Of course at this point I was running on maybe 4 hours of sleep after being awake for 30 hours. It took a while to check in but I got lucky with my luggage and ATN didn’t charge me for an overweight bag, so I didn’t pay quite as much as I worried I might.


Once we got through the airport security, I managed to find a yummy sushi station for dinner. Sadly, even though I was eating Vegetarian sushi, it was incredibly expensive ($25 for 2 rolls and miso soup). At least it was filling and yummy. The Air Tahiti Nui plane was really pretty. The seats are all this pretty aqua/turquoise color with flowers on it. Then they give us a blanket, pillow, socks, earplugs, and a sleep mask! It was a nice change for United where we barely get fed! Sadly even though I was exhausted on that flight, I didn’t really sleep much. The plane left at 11:30 pm LAX time. By the time we landed in Tahiti at 6:00 am local time, after a 9 hour flight, I only slept maybe another 3-4 hours (very interrupted). So after 48 hours of traveling I only slept about 8 hours. I’ll try to post some pictures of the luggage and whatnot in a bit.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hopper Last

Image
So we made Hopper hop....well sorta! We built a bottom for hopper's body by adding 6 puzzle pieces! Lots of fun making puzzle pieces that fit together in a tight fit. Then we have a small tail piece of foam that helps with the balance and the hop of hopper. We got in the long axel and put it in for the double axle of the engine. Unfortunately we picked up the extra long one which messed up our balance and looked REALLY strange. So instead we decided to use the shorter 100 mm axle (not the 150). But at this point our engine started acting up! So after an hour and a half of fiddling with the engine, we got it to stop making weird noises when it ran. We also decided to do some soddering. We soddered the batteries with the engine and added an on/off switch. Lot's of fun soddering again. After all of this our hopper is mostly working. I've shown you tons of pictures so here are the two new ones from friday: This is hopper with the 150 mm axle -- doesn't it look weird! yo...
Read more

Thermal Work - Matlab -- Write up

So I worked with Jeff on the matlab thermal work, since I had missed a fair amount during thesis time. WE managed to finish up everything. Umm ok here goes: So I worked up the part 1 of the thermal challenge in class with Robbie. The cooling and heating of coffee was really easy. But hey, I've done tons and TONS of matlab coding this semester (aka > 200 pages of matlab codes). Any who, what happens with bang bang is lots of oscillation for the control, aka the temperature of the coffee oscillates around the desired temperature. When you code in proportional control, you have trouble reaching the desired temperature. Instead the coffee tends to be right below the desired temperature and never quite reaches the desired temp. I guess Starbucks can't use proportional control then! It is quite fun to add in a time delay for the proportional control and bang-bang control. With bang-bang you see a fair amount of overshoot. You see some overshoot with proportional control too. a...
Read more

Hopper Finale

Image
He works! It's crazy soooo crazy :). Here are some pictures from hopper finale. We did all of the sodering and used the smaller 100 cm axle. We also got the alignment correct between the two legs. And he hops!!!! There is a movie I have, so please email me if you want to see it :). I don't know how to post it here so yea. We decided not to redo any parts as he works pretty solidly! There was one idea to make the big rabbit legs a tad bit smaller so that they rotate completely freely without touching the floor surface when he is hopping, but the weighting of the legs with screws really means that this isn't an issue! I think hopper is adorable and my partner is brilliant. I am good with solidworks and printing but she is good with lots of everything else!
Read more