| October 3 & 4, 2005 Dateline Newark. New Jersey, not California. Specifically, the Mickey D’s across from Gate 80. The vagaries of travel have struck. I’ve missed my flight to Glasgow. But by the time I sit down to write this, things have been taken care of and I have a little time to relax before the next flight out. It seemed like a lot of time, when I first . . . But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I did so much want to rave about the phantastic phallic control tower at Houston’s George Bush airport. All control towers were (more on this past tense reference later) phallic in my vast experience with aircraft, but this one takes the cake. Especially, in comparison with the older one which is still in place and evidently functioning in some other capacity. It’s a normal sized one, but the new one is at least 4 times as tall and very studly. Surely named after the recent renaming of the airport for the President’s father, the President. I’ll be curious to see the control tower that gets named for the President’s son, the President, who seems to have a thing about outdoing his father, the President. But enough of this partisan drabble. We’ll get back to control towers a bit later, but now for Newark. Pretty simple. The plane arrives. I have a bit less than an hour to make the connection. I've figured by now that “Continental Magazine” has layouts of all the airports Continental serves, so I’ve got this under control. Sure, the gate is at the far end of the terminal, but I’m feeling good, considering I have a huge plastic bag given me by the helpful baggage lady in SLC, so I could get my bag weight down to almost 70 pounds, so I didn’t have to leave anything vital behind. But that’s another story, isn’t it? OK, brief digression. I so rarely digress, you'd never expect that, would you? Ferrying half the tools in the Sears inventory so John can have good old Made in the USA tools was no big deal, right? So I’ll have to pay a little extra, right? Well, that’s not the rules any more. Since the 10th of September. The lady had to do some looking up, too, so I didn’t feel like I’d made some really bonehead mistake. Used to be you paid $25 per bag over 50 pounds up to 70 and another $25 per bag up to 100, at least that’s how I’d understood the rules when I read them on the Continental website. But things have changed. Theoretically, nothing over 50 pounds at all? But there are exceptions for baggage from the US? I honestly still don’t understand it, but the first bag lady, and I mean that in the most respectful way, let bag number one go, with 73 pounds, but when she saw 81 on the next one, she sent me to another bag lady to work it out, which I expected meant to pay. The second lady, after reading her regulations, pulled out a big white plastic bag and said, “Put your camera case inside this bag and take enough other things like clothes, but not the tools, out to get the weight down to 70 pounds. Then you carry this bag on and everything will be just fine. And it was. Sort of. I took mostly exotic food out to get down to 71.5 pounds and she said go for it and I took hold of the yarn handles of the bag to go and one immediately broke. I had already been thankful that I had bought two new bags with wheels or it would have been impossible to get 150 pounds as far as I already had, but now I was doubly thankful that both bags were at the mercy of the baggage handlers, because now I had only my new Lowepro Computrekker loaded to the gunnels mostly with camera gear and iBook and a plastic bag containing my Lowepro Toploader full of more camera gear and beef jerky originally meant for Aaron Kearns in Iraq, but lost and replaced and found again later, and Snickers and Hershey Kisses for MoMo. OK, the snickers were for me. But I share, if there are any left. Even using both free hands to carry the bag, I ripped out the top hem before too long and mostly had to carry it in a bear hug for the rest of the trip. So, where were we? Newark, Frank Sinatra’s home town, right? On a jaunt from one side of the airport to the other only to find out that the gate had been changed to about two hundred yards from where I had started. Anybody feel like hotfooting it back to where you just came from? I was thinking of it as a bit of a pain, but no big deal until I got back to gate 72 and nobody was there except this lady who said, “They just left.“ We’re talking about cutting it close here. And I’ve done that before on flights. But not this close. They had just closed the door and were literally backing out and it was just too late. Period. Fortunately, the sinking feeling didn’t last too long. Within 10 minutes I was booked onto the next flight out which would be in less than 3 hours. All I needed to do now was to let Maureen know I would be late. This was not as easy as it should have been. Remember my comments on things forgotten? Well, I have all my phone numbers and addresses and just everything on my new iBook, but somehow the Filemaker software never got on board. Must have missede its flight. And, maybe even worse, I meant to get new calling cards at Sam’s Club but never did, so here I am in the Newark airport at the mercy of Sprint where $20 gets me 45 “units” of call time. Translate that into "minutes” minus whatever fees apply for using a pay phone. Compare that to the 840 units that a little more than $20 gets you at Sam’s. Fortunaqtely, as we educators like to say, it all turned out to be an educational experience. Through the good graces of Kevin & Katherine, I was able to get the phone numbers I needed and Katherine called Maureen to tell her I would be late. An unexpected benefit of the layover was that my bags were already checked through customs when I arrived and we were able to avoid the whole baggage conveyor belt hassle. |
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| September 3 & 4, 2005 Dateline Newark. New Jersey, not California. Specifically, the Mickey D’s across from Gate 80. The vagaries of travel have struck. I’ve missed my flight to Glasgow. But by the time I sit down to write this, things have been taken care of and I have a little time to relax before the next flight out. It seemed like a lot of time, when I first . . . But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I did so much want to rave about the phantastic phallic control tower at Houston’s George Bush airport. All control towers were (more on this past tense reference later) phallic in my vast experience with aircraft, but this one takes the cake. Especially, in comparison with the older one which is still in place and evidently functioning in some other capacity. It’s a normal sized one, but the new one is at least 4 times as tall and very studly. Surely named after the recent renaming of the airport for the President’s father, the President. I’ll be curious to see the control tower that gets named for the President’s son, the President, who seems to have a thing about outdoing his father, the President. But enough of this partisan drabble. We’ll get back to control towers a bit later, but now for Newark. Pretty simple. The plane arrives. I have a bit less than an hour to make the connection. I've figured by now that “Continental Magazine” has layouts of all the airports Continental serves, so I’ve got this under control. Sure, the gate is at the far end of the terminal, but I’m feeling good, considering I have a huge plastic bag given me by the helpful baggage lady in SLC, so I could get my bag weight down to almost 70 pounds, so I didn’t have to leave anything vital behind. But that’s another story, isn’t it? OK, brief digression. I so rarely digress, you'd never expect that, would you? Ferrying half the tools in the Sears inventory so John can have good old Made in the USA tools was no big deal, right? So I’ll have to pay a little extra, right? Well, that’s not the rules any more. Since the 10th of September. The lady had to do some looking up, too, so I didn’t feel like I’d made some really bonehead mistake. Used to be you paid $25 per bag over 50 pounds up to 70 and another $25 per bag up to 100, at least that’s how I’d understood the rules when I read them on the Continental website. But things have changed. Theoretically, nothing over 50 pounds at all? But there are exceptions for baggage from the US? I honestly still don’t understand it, but the first bag lady, and I mean that in the most respectful way, let bag number one go, with 73 pounds, but when she saw 81 on the next one, she sent me to another bag lady to work it out, which I expected meant to pay. The second lady, after reading her regulations, pulled out a big white plastic bag and said, “Put your camera case inside this bag and take enough other things like clothes, but not the tools, out to get the weight down to 70 pounds. Then you carry this bag on and everything will be just fine. And it was. Sort of. I took mostly exotic food out to get down to 71.5 pounds and she said go for it and I took hold of the yarn handles of the bag to go and one immediately broke. I had already been thankful that I had bought two new bags with wheels or it would have been impossible to get 150 pounds as far as I already had, but now I was doubly thankful that both bags were at the mercy of the baggage handlers, because now I had only my new Lowepro Computrekker loaded to the gunnels mostly with camera gear and iBook and a plastic bag containing my Lowepro Toploader full of more camera gear and beef jerky originally meant for Aaron Kearns in Iraq, but lost and replaced and found again later, and Snickers and Hershey Kisses for MoMo. OK, the snickers were for me. But I share, if there are any left. Even using both free hands to carry the bag, I ripped out the top hem before too long and mostly had to carry it in a bear hug for the rest of the trip. So, where were we? Newark, Frank Sinatra’s home town, right? On a jaunt from one side of the airport to the other only to find out that the gate had been changed to about two hundred yards from where I had started. Anybody feel like hotfooting it back to where you just came from? I was thinking of it as a bit of a pain, but no big deal until I got back to gate 72 and nobody was there except this lady who said, “They just left.“ We’re talking about cutting it close here. And I’ve done that before on flights. But not this close. They had just closed the door and were literally backing out and it was just too late. Period. Fortunately, the sinking feeling didn’t last too long. Within 10 minutes I was booked onto the next flight out which would be in less than 3 hours. All I needed to do now was to let Maureen know I would be late. This was not as easy as it should have been. Remember my comments on things forgotten? Well, I have all my phone numbers and addresses and just everything on my new iBook, but somehow the Filemaker software never got on board. Must have missede its flight. And, maybe even worse, I meant to get new calling cards at Sam’s Club but never did, so here I am in the Newark airport at the mercy of Sprint where $20 gets me 45 “units” of call time. Translate that into "minutes” minus whatever fees apply for using a pay phone. Compare that to the 840 units that a little more than $20 gets you at Sam’s. Fortunaqtely, as we educators like to say, it all turned out to be an educational experience. Through the good graces of Kevin & Katherine, I was able to get the phone numbers I needed and Katherine called Maureen to tell her I would be late. An unexpected benefit of the layover was that my bags were already checked through customs when I arrived and we were able to avoid the whole baggage conveyor belt hassle. |
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