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Monday: The Stormy Ride
Home
I don't get much sleep Sunday night thanks to a dish they called
"chicken continuum" at Star Trek: The Experience - actually, it was a
very good meal, but the nearly-random responses of my digestive system can make
any meal misfire on me later. In any event, I've gotten only three or so hours
of sleep by the time my wake-up call hits a little bit after 7:00am. I have to
catch my shuttle bus to the airport at 8:50, so there's no time to waste. I've
already got just about everything packed, leaving my bags open for things like
toiletries and last-minute items. I'm out the door and checked out of my room
by 8:35, and I figure I'll breathe some outside air and park my butt on a bench
just outside the Plaza.
8:50 comes and goes. No bus. 9:20 finally rolls around and I go back into
the lobby to call the bus line...and nobody answers. I wait ten minutes,
then go back and call again, at which point they tell me that the bus I'm
waiting for will be there in a minute or two. By the time I get to the front
door, it's pulling in. The ride to the airport is a bit less twisty than the
ride from the airport was - we blast down the Strip and straight into the
airport. I wonder why we didn't come out that way. The usual
"heightened security" airport routine once again: shoes for industry!
Shoes for freedom!
By the way, Angelo Martinez, please pick up the damned courtesy phone
and dial zero already. They've been paging you long enough.
On approach to Dallas/Fort Worth, the bad weather which seems to be aiming
for me so often welcomes me back to my part of the country: severe weather keeps
the plane in the air, circling Dallas very bumpily for over an hour - take
that, Star Trek: The Experience. We finally land, and my connecting
flight has already left without me in that time. The next flight is over an
hour away. Talk about a hot game of Looping. Worse yet, for the first
half-hour of my prolonged visit to the American Eagle terminal at DFW, there's
a really drunk guy, in his 40s or 50s, waiting for his flight to Waco,
and he's literally harrassing the desk attendants and anyone else he can get
within arm's reach of, bellowing "Ooookay! Let's go! Board
the plane! Let's fly! Gotta go!" He screams it in
their ears if they lets him get close enough. If, by some vast cosmic
coincidence, you are reading this, sir, please know that your
badly-behaved-five-year-old bellyaching doesn't become you, was supremely
annoying, and was a signal that my vacation had reached an unwelcome end.
Thank you. And do try not to drink so much next time you fly.
(As I sit in the terminal writing this, I'm overhearing the desk crew
talking about a "problem passenger" on the Waco flight. Gee, I wonder
who it could be? And apparently it's delayed them enough to keep them grounded
during a sudden violent downpour. Heh. No comment.)
Four hours later, I'm still there. Flights have been delayed by bad weather
since before I got here, and I've been transferred to a 9:00pm flight back home.
Then it slides back to 10:00. 10:30. You get the idea. At 11:00pm we finally
board a plane...which then develops a mechanical problem, forcing us to
disembark and wait for another small plane to be readied. It's 11:45 before
we're finally in the air, and technically speaking, Tuesday morning before we
land back in Fort Smith.
My wife picks me up and brings me home, where - as if I didn't already
acquire enough loot in Vegas - she surprises me with the two latest Doctor Who DVDs and the Evil Dead Book
Of The Dead special edition DVD (packaged in a hysterically funny fleshy-rubber
replica of the movies' Necronomicon). The long process of dubbing my four hours
of video from Vegas begins. My cats are glad to see me. It's good to be home
again.
But I can hardly wait for CGE 2004.
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