An Eclectic Mind

Traveling again.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me here in a while, it’s because I’ve been traveling. I’m doing one of my Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventures in northern Arizona, accompanied by a video crew and staff writer for a respected travel magazine.

The goal of this trip is to gather about 90% of the video needed to create three individual broadcast-length videos, each of which will be made available on DVD. It’s a huge project and, so far, we have at least 20 hours of raw video footage to wade through.

I’m flying with a door off and a video guy on board taking glare-free video images of what we fly over. He also has at least two POV.1 cameras mounted inside the helicopter at all times. The other video on the ground is “chasing” us — actually, he’s getting a big head start each day to drive to the airport where we’ll land before we arrive — and taking video of us landing. Then there are cameras whirring all over the place on the ground.

The writer is sitting up front beside me, taking notes and using my Nikon D80 to shoot images of what she sees. Although a good portion of the shots have some unfortunate glare — not much you can do about that when shooting through Plexiglas — many of them are really good. Like this shot she took of a herd of wild horses we overflew on the Navajo Reservation two days ago.

It’s been a busy week so far. Although I’m trying to demonstrate to the writer what my Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure is all about, I’m also working with the video crew to make sure we capture all of the footage we need for our three videos. I’m hoping she understands that my usual clients won’t be rushing around like nuts all day.

I’m treating myself to a few of the activities my excursion guests get to enjoy. For example, on Tuesday, I joined the crew for a boat ride on Lake Powell that visited the “business side” of the Glen Canyon Dam before squeezing about a mile up Antelope Canyon (see photo) and gliding up Navajo Canyon for a look at the “tapestry” of desert varnish on some cliff walls. I skipped the Sedona Jeep tour and Monument Valley tour to work with one of the video guys or just rest up. Normally, while my guest are touring, I’m scrambling to get the luggage into their hotel room and confirming reservations for the next day. You might imagine how tired I am after 6 days of playing pilot and baggage handler.

At this moment, however, I’m sitting at the dining table of a double-wide mobile home near Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley. (Long story; believe it or not, the only lodging we cold get here in MV was in a pair of mobile homes that are part of the lodge.) I have the front drapes drawn aside so I can watch the eastern sky brighten for what promises to be a classic silhouetted butte sunrise. I always enjoy my dawns here at MV. Seeing the famous buttes outside my window is always surreal.

Today, we were scheduled to fly down to Winslow for lunch, then tour Meteor Crater and the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River. Normally, the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure takes this route on the way to its last overnight stop at Flagstaff. But today we’ll probably go straight back to Page. I have four aerial photo shoots at Page starting on Friday morning; the money I make doing them will pay for this video excursion. We’ll do more video between those flights. Then we’ll hit the Crater, Falls, and Flagstaff on our way back to the Phoenix area on Sunday.

It’s a big trip and a bunch of huge projects. Just the kind of thing to keep me busy between flights for the winter season. But if all works well and as planned, I might be flying this route weekly in the coming spring and fall — with real paying passengers to take care of along the way.

Flying, Travels with Maria Antelope Canyon, Arizona, DVD, Flagstaff, Flying, Grand Canyon, helicopters, horses, Horseshoe Bend, Lake Powell, Monument Valley, National Park, Navajo, Phoenix, photography, Rainbow Bridge, Sedona, tourism, travel

My capsule review of the Internet-based DVD rental service.

I joined Netflix about two months ago and, in general, have been satisfied with the service. That’s not to say the relationship has been trouble-free. It hasn’t.

Netflix offers four plans for membership. I chose the cheapest plan: $9.99 per month for one DVD at a time with an unlimited number of DVDs per month. The plan is perfect for us in that it enables us to watch, on average, two DVDs per week. That brings the per DVD rental cost down to less than $2 per title — cheaper than pay per view and both cheaper and more convenient than going to the local video rental place.

Here’s how it works. After setting up an account, you browse or search the extensive movie library for titles, actors, directors, etc. that interest you. See one you want to watch? Click an Add button to add it to your Queue. Once a movie is in your Queue you can shuffle it around in the list order. The ones on the top are the ones you’ll see first, in the order in which they appear.

What’s kind of neat is that you can add a movie to your queue before it’s available in DVD — even before it’s been released to theaters. As soon as it’s available, just shift it to the top of your queue to get it right away.

In my plan, I only get one DVD at a time, so the plan is pretty simple. Netflix sends me the DVD at the top of my queue. They send me an e-mail message telling me that it’s been shipped and giving me an estimated receipt date. Since the local shipping point for me is in Phoenix, I usually get the DVD the day after it ships. So something that ships out today will be in my mailbox tomorrow.

The DVD comes in a red tyvek envelope that contains a white tyvek envelope with a sticker describing the movie. There’s no DVD case and no liner notes. Just the movie. I pop the movie into my DVD player, watch it, then pull it back out and stick it back into the red envelope, which has a tear-away portion that removes my address and replaces it with Netflix’s. I drop the envelope in the local mail box and it goes back to Netflix. It usually gets there in a day or so, depending on the day of the week. (There’s no mail service on Sundays, so that’s a dead day.) Then the whole process starts all over again.

At the beginning of this piece I alluded to a less than perfect relationship. That’s because I’ve had two problems so far:

• One of the DVDs was scratched to the point that it would not play properly. Although most of the movie played, there was about a 15-minute sequence that was messed up, with lots of skipping forward. This is evidently a common problem, since Netflix has a customer service form with this listed as a possible reason for contact. They offered to provide a replacement DVD, but it wasn’t so bad that we couldn’t see the movie, so I let it go. Still, I’ve since looked at the underside of each DVD and have been shocked at the number of scratches on each one. Is it that the tyvek envelopes don’t properly protect the DVDs? Or are other subscribers downright careless with them? I don’t know.
• The other day, I got an e-mail confirmation that the movie I’d returned had been received at Netflix. The only problem is, I never saw the movie. It was shipped to me and then shipped back without ever getting into my mailbox. This was a problem that was not on the customer service form and I had a heck of a time finding contact information to report the problem. Netflix responded the next day, saying that occasionally the envelopes get damaged in shipping and, when the outer envelope gets torn off, the DVD simply comes back. (Either that or one of my neighbors enjoyed the movie and graciously returned it for me.) They promised to send a replacement movie while my next selection was on its way — so I could “catch up,” so to speak. Trouble is, they sent the same movie that was next in my queue, so I got two copies of the same movie. I guess that’s what happens when you let a human take the job of a computer.

I use the “three strikes and you’re out” rule with customer service. Netflix, so far, has two strikes — in less than two months! They aren’t the only organization offering this kind of service. Blockbuster, in an effort to save their failing company, has also launched an Internet-based DVD rental service. If Netflix drops the ball again anytime soon, I’ll surf over to the competition to see what they have to offer.

Days in My Life, Multimedia DVD, NetFlix, videos