Cold November Rain

Had to get up to New York, NY for a day. Got a good flight up to LGA, direct from GSP, just a couple of hours. Put in some work on the latest paper I'm working on, and then took a shuttle bus out to the rental car place. I don't really like LGA, it seems like an old airport, with somewhat strange driving connections (the highways in NY are strange, at least to me).

The highway out to Long Island (the Long Island Expressway, or LIE), was pretty busy, but traffic moved along ok. The return side looked like it was packed. Hey, check out the gas prices: $3.39 per gallon, wow! Back where I live, it's still at $2.85 but it's likely to go up if the price per barrel goes over $100. Finding the hotel was facilitated by Google maps, a super service. Sometimes they don't always give you the most direct route, but pretty close most of the time.

After seeing the folks and sibling, it was time to get back on the LIE and head back to LGA. I think the Wednesday before Thanksgiving might be the busiest travel day of the year, so I got up 6 hours before the flight to make sure I'd have plenty of time to deal with traffic, rental car return, shuttle bus to terminal, check-in, security, and, time permitting, breakfast and a Starbucks. Got all that accomplished and had a couple of hours to put more work in on the paper. The terminal was busy indeed. In trying to get some work done I kept getting these noisy kids sitting beside me. What saved me was iTunes and a pair of headphones. I played Blackened Blue Eyes by The Charlatans on single-song repeat.

Got some decent work done before flying home through Memphis. The plane out of LGA was late and I only had 10 minutes to catch the connecting flight. Luckily Corey was monitoring my flights and called me just after we touched down in MEM. She told me the flight to GSP was on time and that I better start running. She told me the gate and it was off to the races. I got to the gate to find the gate door closed. Luckily the plane hadn't yet pushed back. The attendant at the gate next door was on the ball and quickly punched the key code to let me in down the gate-connector-thingy (whatever that little tunnel on wheels is called). I don't know how they did it, but they even managed to get my bag on the plane so it showed up on the carousel in Greenville even though I had already started the paperwork on filing for lost luggage.