Last Fathers’ day, my lovely wife bought me a Groupon for a helicopter flying lesson.
Cool!
The only downside, is that the text for the sale really didn’t imply what should have been obvious, they don’t just sit you down in the pilot’s seat and hand you the keys. Instead there’s a lot of reading involved to prep, a ground school class, AND you effectively had to make two trips: one for ground school, then one for the actual lesson. Oddly, it was this last part that was the deal killer for me. I’ve done about 80% of the reading. Frankly whirling blades of death, flying off the ground, dodging other aircraft and conversing with federal air traffic control employees in code? I’m ok doing the legwork to avoid dying. But the airport is about an hour from our house, so going twice is a problem. Luckily, they had an option to convert it to a simple, abbreviated helicopter tour instead, which I availed myself of.
Like I said though, the airport’s an hour from our house. So logistically it’s a big trip on a weekend because you need to deal with the kids, make sure your significant other isn’t unduly burdened with the minion minding duties, etc. Well, a while back there was another Groupon for a family season pass to both the Stone Zoo and the Franklin Park Zoo here in Mass. The Stone Zoo just happens to be about 15-20 minutes from the airport. Excellent, family road trip!
So off we go, stopping at Fresh City in Burlington for lunch. Minion 3.01 managed to trip on the brick walkway outside the restaurant, with his hands in his pockets, and landed face first on the walkway. He’s ok, a bit scraped, bloodied, and banged up, but he’ll live. I’ll just say now, he was in pain the rest of the day, and moody as all get out. Not fun.
Quickly? I wouldn’t recommend Fresh City if you have kids. The food’s good enough. The prices are a little high, but let’s face it, McDonald’s is probably artificially lower than it should be, so my gripe isn’t even with the money. No, the problem lies with two things: ordering and trays.
They have a kids menu, which is always welcome, but when you order they have three lines, basically representing categories of their menu. If you’re ordering one thing, great! If you have a kid you’re ordering with, and the kid wants something from another category, do you really want to wait in a second line? Hey-ell no. So I got a little lip from the kid behind the sneeze guard, but to his credit, he sent my kid’s rice bowl order to the right station for us.
So we get the food and it comes on these round plastic bowl tray things. Again, fine if you’re alone, but if you’re hauling and collecting pieces of a meal for two? You’ll need a regular tray. The regular trays, are just barely big enough to fit two of these bowl trays on. They are, however, not really big enough to fit two bowl trays AND two fountain drink cups on safely. Anyway, like I said, food was ok. It was about $15 bucks for me and 5.6. My wife bought for her and 3.01.
We’ve had lunch, 3.01 is cranky, moaning and bleeding, but we’ve gotten him some pain killers from the pharmacy, the temperatures are dropping and it’s about 1 o’clock. My flight’s at 4. Given I was now chilled (long story…short form is I did something nice to keep the elder minion warm that was to my detriment) I was more inclined to go to the mall. The kids reallllllllllllly wanted to go to the zoo though. Since I was working the pedals today, I turned us northward off to the zoo.
Luckily we had coats and warmed a bit, so the zoo was fairly nice. See? Flamingos:
It's like a yard from plastic hell
The kids had a pretty good time, and didn’t want to leave:
I'm not sure, but I think they're trying to hotwire a coin operated ride
We all had our favorites, but mine were the emperor tamerins, I find their little mustaches amusing. There was a sad bit to the visit; the zoo has a gibbon they got from another zoo, and it only has one arm. From what the sign said, something was thrown to him by a visitor at another zoo and it did sufficient damage that most of the arm had to be amputated. The upside is he’s still wonderfully mobile and swings around the cage just fine.
Finally, on to the flight! I’m impressed you’ve stuck it out this long, bravo!
We made far better time than I expected and got to the airport about ten after 3. Hanscom airfield is a typical local airport, mostly private, small planes and jets. I was amused to see a full fledged TSA checkpoint and post-screening sterile area, though the checkpoint was closed. I’m really kind of curious under what conditions it’s opened. Maybe it’s a Monday through Friday thing when there are some Florida bound flights out or something.
Anyway…the flight was conducted through the East Coast Aero Club, from what I met, a fairly nice bunch of people. I was expecting to have to fill out an indemnity waiver or something, but nope, just “Well you’re in the right place, come back this way closer to 4.” From some of the text on their site, I get the impression they were a bit annoyed with the Groupon experience as a vendor as it didn’t accurately represent the amount of work that the buyers were going to have to do to fly (assuming they were to take it as a lesson), an they probably were catching hell for it from a lot of the 2100+ people that purchased one. If so, I can’t say I blame them. Also, in all likelihood, the idea was to sell low cost first lessons, get folks hooked and hopefully they’d come back for higher priced subsequent lessons. If so, I’m guessing it didn’t go as planned.
Finally, 4 rolled around and I met our pilot, Jeff, and my two travelling companions. I think their names were Martin and Elizabeth. Before we headed out to the tarmac, the minions both gave me a giant hug, and I found out later that the older one was genuinely worried about me falling out of the helicopter. Sweet kid, huh? I had given my keys to my wife on the off chance I became a charred corpse so that she could drive home, but I wasn’t exactly worried; helicopters can autorotate, in some ways making them safer than airplanes in the event of a problem, and I’ve never been afraid of flying. No, at this point my biggest concern was whether I’d get to sit up front or if the other couple was going try get into a schmoopie war trying to be nice and letting the other up sit up front. Luckily they stuck together in the back seat.
I'm in the front passenger seat
According to the ECAC web site, my scenic Groupon conversion was going to be a trip over nearby Walden pond and then back. Still a good deal for the $80 my wife paid if you ask me. I have to say, I was impressed. We went nearly all the way to Boston and back.
Hey, I know that town!
Kinda pretty up here
The John Hancock tower
At the very least, we were into Cambridge in amazing time.
Harvard University
MIT
I didn’t go to either, but for some reason I’ve always thought MIT was cooler. I think it’s the heavy tech leanings at MIT whereas when I think of Harvard, I think lawyers and doctors.
Heading back:
If I remember correctly, that's Rte. 2
To the middle left of this next picture is a company called Lincoln Labs. I’m not entirely sure what they do there, and I actually didn’t intend to get them in the photo, but I think I want to work there. It’s a cool looking defense contractor looking place with several radar domes on the roof. How could they NOT be doing something cool there?
Heading back to the airport
All in all it was a wonderful flight and tour, and I’d whole heartedly recommend these folks if you were looking to book such a flight.
An hour or so later, we were all quite relieved to be home.
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I’d like to add, as a side note, 3.01′s been potty training for about a week or so now. He woke up dry this morning, and was in a pull-up for most of the day, only wetting it once, which we suspect may have happened during his nap in the car. Though, given he did a face plant on bricks, we can certainly overlook one problem. The rest of the day he did his business where appropriate, an even let us know when he needed a restroom at the zoo. Go J!
The joys of the glass biz
Fire! Danger! Beautiful pieces of artwork!
Sure, that’s the outside bit that we convey to people, that we work with the primitive forces of nature to bring you a pretty or useful something or another, but have you ever looked behind the curtain? Occasionally I share some of the behind the scenes bits of the craft with you, hoping it doesn’t ruin the magic, but I find it’s good to help the customer’s understanding of what goes on, as well as provide some information for folks just starting out.
So today we’re going to talk a little about supply prices, in particular, gas.
Not the stuff we put in our car, though wooooo-boy, it’s expensive, but rather the stuff that runs the torch. In my case, my torch runs on propane and oxygen. The propane is pricey, but I find it lasts me a lot longer than the oxygen. It runs at a far lower pressure so the tank goes much further.
But oxygen…who would have thought air would be so expensive? That’s part of the problem though, it’s not “air” as we think about it. That contains oxygen, but also nitrogen, various particulates, etc., etc. This is just the oxygen, and it’s about 98% pure. In my case I bring it into my shop in 5 foot fall canisters called K tanks.
Over the years I’ve stuck with the same supplier and my price has crept up quite a bit. I started around $22.00 per fill (plus tax and fees) and most recently was paying $45.00 a tank, plus tax and fees, bringing it to around $51.00. Mind you, I’m a cash and carry customer, not on a contract, but I’ve also been with the same supplier for about 4 years now, don’t mess up their equipment, and usually haul the tanks myself. So I was a bit dismayed to hear what other folks in the industry were paying for for their oxygen, and I found another supplier. The other supplier offered me $15 per tank.
$15.
This was without negotiation, no contract, I didn’t have to harangue them or talk them down, that’s what they offered me. Hells yeah!
Normally, since I’m a part time glass blower, I go through about 2 tanks a month during the non-holiday season, but because of a variety of other things going on in my life, I haven’t been in the shop as much as I’d like to be, so for over a month I had 4 tanks (my old ones I was still burning through and the two from the new supplier) in my shop. Finally, this week, I finished off my old suppliers tanks and took them over to terminate my lease on them.
I’m going to pause for a moment and say that, while I won’t name the company here, the crew at my old supplier is awesome, a nice bunch of people in general; helpful and knowledgeable to boot. So my closing of this contract wasn’t a personal decision, it was simply financial. In all honesty, my new supplier’s FAR less convenient, particularly since they don’t have Saturday hours.
I’m happy to say that my old supplier offered me a better price. Not as low as the new supplier’s price (the old guys are regional, I don’t fault them on not being able to match), but far better than my old $45 price. I still said no.
I have the bottles from the new supplier already, and there was one thing that irked me. Though my old supplier apologized (which I do deeply appreciate in this day and age), the problem is that someone really should have caught this earlier. Like I said, I try to be a good customer, but my price crept up so high that my friends were insulted for me. I have to wonder if everyone is paying that higher price from this vendor or if it was some intentional…I hesitate to say sleight since that’s not really the right word, but if it was an intentional attempt to just gouge a little guy. I wonder that because as a cash and carry customer, it’s not like there was an automatic delivery and billing in effect, each time a human being had to see that price on the screen and charge me that amount knowing full well what other customers pay. Again, to his credit, the employee I talked to when I turned in the bottles apologized and said that this should have been caught before it got to this point. He even offered to cover my tank lease for the next 2 years.
Who knows? If the new supplier doesn’t work out because of the timing issue, I basically have to run tanks on a lunch break, I may go back, and I most certainly left that door open when I dropped off the empties for the last time, but for now, I have a new oxygen supplier. Business decisions aren’t always fun.
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