Sep 28th – Day 1.
The US flying adventure starts here. This will become my 4th flying trip within North America. Together with my Belgian fellow pilot Ludo (who’s making his 1st flying trip within the USA), we departed with Lufthansa from Luxembourg and arrived in Denver via a quick stop in Frankfurt.
Upon arrival in Denver Colorado, we’ve picked up our car at the airport and checked in at the Double Tree Hilton.
First, we took care of some practical stuff such as securing a local data sim cards in the US for our Ipad’s in order to avoid huge roaming charges.
Being non US residents does not make this easy. One of my Russian friends in Luxembourg provided me with two US Verizon and one AT-T sim card, explaining me I should try them out and recharge them. Getting the AT-T card working was not too much of a problem. Arriving in Denver, I had right away LTE connectivity speed. Very nice ! We faced however an issue with the Verizon Data sim card ( some incompatibly stuff). We made a call with the Verizon helpdesk and were advised to visit a Verizon shop. Not too difficult. After applying a little trick ( using the IMEI of my Ipad on Ludo’s sim card, my friend Ludo was now able to use a Verizon data sim card). The prices of both our AT-T and Verizon data cards are quite reasonable. We pay some 50 to 60 USD per person for some 6GB of data traffic each. We’ve setup the Voipmobile app on top of this and are now able to make unlimited phone calls to our home basis for no money (all European landlines for free and calls to mobile phones for just 1 cent). Absolutely amazing and advanced VOIP technology.
Time for a beer to end our first day in the US. In our hotel, the barkeeper proposed us several Belgian beers. Being a native Belgian, we entered into a -friendly- discussion as none of these beers are Belgian. The barkeeper explained us that these ” Belgian style ” beers were bottled in a microbrewery in Colorado by some locals who passed time in Belgian. Nice story, but these are not Belgian beers. We tried the Blue Moon, it tasted very well although.
