While I managed to make it home to Southern California before the airline system got majorly screwed up, my journey was not without complications. Before getting on my bus to the Philadelphia Airport, I received an automated call notifying me that my flight on Delta from PHL to ATL would be 30 minutes late. “No problem,” I thought, “On the scale of things, that’s nothing, and I’ll still have plenty of time to make my connection to Orange County.” Of course, once I arrived at the airport for my 4:55 scheduled departure, they announced it would be delayed 30 minutes further. As I started to investigate alternate flights to Southern California, since I would now likely miss my connection, they moved my flight’s gate.
Our old gate was to be occupied by the 5:55 scheduled Delta departure to Atlanta. I figured that flight would be delayed too, but no. The flight that was scheduled to leave for Atlanta an hour after ours started boarding before ours. I found this bearable only because of the mild irony. The major irony came in the fact that the concourse only had one tow bar for MD-88s, so the other flight’s earlier push-back meant that we had to sit and wait even longer as it pushed back and taxied behind us, on its way to a much earlier takeoff.
With such shenanigans in Philadelphia, I was sure I would miss my connecting flight in Atlanta. I really didn’t want to spend the night in the Atlanta hotel, so when we pulled into gate B3 at 9:00 PM, I was determined to make it to a flight to Southern California. The monitors at the gate showed a 9:15 PM flight to LAX at gate A26 and a 9:15 PM flight to San Diego at gate B32. I figured that these flights had already boarded, but I sprinted the length of the B concourse to get to the San Diego flight (I didn’t want to have run people over on the underground moving walkways to concourse A). The gate agent somehow interpreted my breathless rants about missing my connection, and I got on the plane to San Diego. Altogether, the evening was an appropriately hectic end to a very hectic semester.
Saturday was my last airline flight of 2008. I ended up making 21 takeoffs and landings this year, including my first trips through San Diego, Chicago Midway, Salt Lake City, Raleigh-Durham, and Managua. I used to love flying and airports, but the airlines and, to an even greater extent, the TSA, have destroyed every last bit of enjoyment I used to derive from them. Maybe some carbon offsets will make me feel better about all the flying.
This evening, I returned from a trip to New York that will be my last for quite a while. There were some enjoyable highlights on the ride back. Of course, I got stuck in an aisle seat and out of respect of others’ personal space (which some of my fellow passengers seemed to lack), I couldn’t lean over to the window and snap any pictures. What I saw:
While I missed the moonrise last night due to clouds, I got an awesome view of a huge full moon rising over Manhattan as we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel.
Around Exit 14-14C of the New Jersey Turnpike, the lights of five planes on approach to EWR’s runway 4R could be seen stretching out in the distance. They appeared to form a downward opening parabola, with the closest light about to land and the farthest just above the lights of the Goethals Bridge. It almost looked like the lights of the bridge were flying off and skipping over to Newark. Very cool.
One of the tall gas flares at the Linden Cogen Facility had numerous strings of lights attached to the top, spreading out to form a circle at ground level. That’s right, an illuminated petrochemical Christmas tree. Only in New Jersey…
We passed about 30 utility trucks and cherry pickers with their lights flashing heading north on the Turnpike. Quite the convoy of reinforcements heading up to get the power back on up in New England.
Unlike the many travellers who faced delays into the Philadelphia airport yesterday, my Thanksgiving travels went quite smoothly. I rode the R3 from Swarthmore to 30th Street to catch an Amtrak train to Washington, DC on Thanksgiving morning. After spending Thanksgiving at my cousins’ house, I drove down to Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon. Other than some minor traffic congestion and an extended break (including stops at Wendy’s, Sonic, and Wawa) at I-95’s exit 61B south of Richmond, the trip was expedient.
My flight from Raleigh Durham to Philadelphia on Southwest was a piece of cake (and I used one of my stockpiled ATT Wi-Fi cards that PHL gives out to college students for internet at RDU), though taking the 37 to the 109 bus to get back to campus took a while. The only hiccup I could find the whole weekend was a closed bathroom at PHL.
I had some great food over the weekend: the traditional Thanksgiving fare, Raclette, and my first tastes of pecan pie and Allen & Son’s Barbecue (the Ducks Unlimited stickers on the front window and the taxodermied mallard above my table completed this lovely North Carolina cultural experience). And, in what has become a Thanksgiving tradition for me at my cousin’s house, I helped make (and devout) four trays of apple crisp. I may be able to work off the calories by Christmas…
Last night, our men’s soccer team fell to Amherst 0-1. Amherst, whom I saw playing last year at Tufts, brought a strong team (and pretty cute team jackets) to end Swat soccer’s season. It was a fun (and freezing) game to watch - probably the first and only soccer game I’ll watch when there’s snow on the ground.
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