Surfin’ USA

Home sweet home (other side of the Atlantic)

After a long day of traveling with a fair amount of delays, I arrived back in Irvine yesterday night. In spite of the ongoing strike at Lufthansa, I flew from Dusseldorf to Chicago — with a 2 hour delay due to the strike (it seems I was still lucky, Lufthansa started canceling intercontinental flights today). My flight from Chicago to Orange County was also 45 min late, after waiting in the takeoff line on the tarmac with dozens of other planes. In addition, one of my two checked bags didn’t make the connecting flight and will be arriving here today.
But given all the uncertainty beforehand (due to the strike), I am quite happy to be back in California in one piece and more or less as scheduled.

For those of you that heard of yesterday’s earthquake in the Los Angeles area, I was still in the air when it happened. The epicenter was reported to be ~50km northeast from Irvine. From what I hear the earth shook quite a bit for 30 sec, but there was no significant damage to buildings and structures. And more importantly, noone was hurt (in Irvine as well as elsewhere).