Year: 2006

Got to the Chicago airport 20 minutes early. They didn’t have any food that I wanted so I settled for chips and cheese and Sprite. Pretty much every flight leaving Chicago was delayed by an hour or two, including mine. At some point I’m talking to Jammie when she gets a call from Nate, wanting to know what my flight number is. After I hang up with Jammie, I eventually end up calling the PLA Voice Bridge and hear Nate and Mgross (and somebody else I think) in a phone call with some airport lady, trying to contact me with some kind of an emergency. Something to do with my wife being pregnant and me being in Chicago to visit my girlfriend.

Eventually I get paged at the airport so I go to the desk and tell them that I’m Brad Carter. This really nice old man seems genuinely concerned and tells me that I got an emergency phone call from a doctor. He tells me the doctor’s name and asks if I know him and I tell him yes. The entire time, I’m on the bridge with my cell phone so everyone can hear me retrieving my message. The old man hands me a note, telling me my doctor’s name and the phone number to the bridge. He tells me good luck and that he hopes it all works out okay. I respond with something like, “Yeah, my wife, when she had her last baby she died so we’re hoping that doesn’t happen again.” Both the old man and the lady next to him give me an, “Oh my!” (or something like that) to let me know they understand what I must be going through. Then I walk away, leaving them to be confused about the statement.

So that was fun. Thanks for making my flight delay a little more interesting!

My flight finally left at 11:20 and got to NYC about 2 hours later. There was a big thunderstorm over the airport so they had to circle around a few times, waiting for the storm to pass which seemed to take forever. We landed at 3:00am. Here’s countykid’s take on last night’s events.

I just barely made my 1:30pm flight. Barely, as in running up to the gate, out of breath, just as they were going to close the door.

The Amtrak got me to the station around 12:15. Just 30 minutes late which wasn’t so bad. I resisted the urge to get into a taxi, and instead walked 8 or so blocks through Chinatown in the rain to the Max stop. By then it was 12:30 and it’s a 30 minute train ride to the airport. We arrived at the airport at 1:05.

I walked as quickly as I could to the security checkpoint, to find 3 horribly long lines. I picked the shortest one and spent my time sending nervous text messages to Jammie.

The line moved quickly enough, then the guy wanted to hand search my jacket pockets since I had so much weird-looking metal stuff in there. By now it’s 1:25. A text message from Jammie reads, “RUN!” So I do, carrying my shoes, laptop, jacket, backpack, suitcase, lucky bowling pin and my glow in the dark snorkle.

The overhead PA announces a final boarding call for my flight and thankfully tells me the gate number since I hadn’t managed to get that yet. Luckily it’s fairly close – gate A9. I arrive right at 1:30, the closest I’ve ever come to missing a flight.

I’m on the plane now and it’s 3:13 PST, drinking a Pepsi, bored to death but happy not to be stranded in the airport for the night. Only 2.5 hours til Chicago.

I skipped breakfast this morning and we didn’t even get pretzels or peanuts on this flight. I’m gonna be starving when we reach Chicago. Hopefully the bar there has decent food.

So Vanessa set me up on a flight on a Friday the 13th AND on a full moon. If I still had life insurance, I might be suspicious. Pretty uneventful train ride so far. Lots of flooding in the scenery. Looks like we’ll be just 20 minutes late arriving in Portland. Hey, Mgross, I’ll be in Chicago for an hour if you’d like me to buy you a beer. Oh wait, Mgross doesn’t use LJ. He uses Cal’s.

Ugh, our train is completely stopped right now. Maybe we’ll be more than 20 minutes late. Ah well, I should still have plenty of time to catch the plane.

It’s a rare thing for me to have a “hectic” day but I think tomorrow will indeed be hectic. Or maybe just a little stressful. No, not stressful. Worrisome. Perhaps not so worrisome as …wait, yeah. Worrisome. Just for a few hours in the morning, then it worrisome is upgraded to just plain bored for the rest of the day. Assuming that I make it to my plane on time, that is.

So tomorrow I get up, get the kids ready for school and take them 30 minutes earlier than usual which is 8:30am. (School doesn’t start until 9:00 here. WTF.) Then I speed back home, park my car, get my suitcase and backpack and WALK to the train station. Probably in the rain so add an umbrella to that. Hopefully it’s just a drizzle. But it’s only maybe a 10 – 15 minute walk. I’m supposed to be at the train station at 9:15 but it doesn’t leave until 9:45 and I don’t have baggage to check.

I’m supposed to arrive in Portland at 11:45am and my flight to NYC leaves at 1:30pm. The metro train is 6 blocks from the Amtrak station and it leads right into the airport. It takes maybe 20 – 30 minutes to get from the metro to the airport. All this is pretty easy but my worry is that the Amtrak will get delayed. And if that happens, I’m pretty screwed. And Amtrak sure seems to get delayed a lot from what I’ve observed. There’s the el_jefe incident from last year and then Nate’s delays this year. I remember my trip from Portland to Texas 10 years ago was delayed consistently for the entire trip. The Albany Amtrak guy assured me today that this is a very reliable train. It’s only got a couple of stops along the way so there’s not much that can go wrong with it. And if it’s late getting to the Albany station, I can always just run back home, get my car and drive to Portland.

If I didn’t have the kids, I could just take the 6:30am train and have hours to spare in Portland. But since this is the last time I’ll see them for 2 weeks, I didn’t want to not have them here.

I got everything packed tonight and got my laptop all primed for the trip. The damn battery is dead again. I just replaced my laptop battery a little over a year ago and now it’s dead already. It holds a charge of maybe 5 minutes. My other laptop’s hard drive quit working last week. At least my Pocket PC seems to be doing well. I just realized today why I had problems with it on my last trip – I didn’t have the box checked in the options that told it to charge the battery via the USB cable. I ended up buying a Pocket PC battery that I didn’t need. But at least I have twice the Pocket PC power now. Both batteries are completely charged for the trip. I have no book to read for this trip.

Yesterday I did laundry. And I brought my laptop with me to help pass the time for an hour. That’s when I discovered that my battery wouldn’t hold a charge. As I came back into the laundrymat from the convenience store, some guy sees me and goes, “Uhh…is that your car out there? The white one with Illinois plates?!?” I’m thinking, “Oh shit, it’s got a flat tire or he’s smashed into it or something.” Turns out he just wanted to ask me what the weather was like in Illinois.

He got a call on his cell soon after that and he told me he was receiving harassing phone calls on his cell phone. He was waiting for them to call back just once more so that he could officially file a police report. He said whoever it was wasn’t blocking their caller ID. All ready to impress him with some elite phone company social engineering skills, I asked him for the number. Unfortunately it was a local land line and that billing office would already be closed. I put the number into my laptop’s phone book database but nothing came up on it. Right about then is when my laptop battery died. It’s probably a good thing that I couldn’t find any info, because this guy seemed a little crazy and I think it was just some lady who got a wrong number and he started yelling at her. That’s what I got from his story, anyway.