No way I can leave it at that.  Not when there’s so much more to tell.

So I left my house at 5 am yesterday, headed to LAX.  The morning began with two bits of dumb luck:  first, that the trip to Montreal is going to last five days, and thus I couldn’t use my usual roll-aboard suitcase, and so had already planned on checking my bag, and so would get to keep my toiletries; and second, that I drove myself to the airport, and thus got to listen to NPR on the way, and so knew what was going on, and so was prepared for the madness that I found when I got there.

The lines were absolutely unreal.  The line of folks trying to check in outside terminal 1, for instance, stretched all the way back to, and halfway down in front of, terminal 2.  Things were bad over in terminal 6, where Continental is, too.  The first line wasn’t terrible for me, at least, as I got to use the super elite line to check my bag, and thus only waited about ten minutes.  The line for security, however, took forever, and everybody around me was in a foul mood.

I made it upstairs, finally, where I quickly wrote the last post and headed to my gate.  My plane boarded on time, and left only a few minutes late, packed completely full.  And the flight was pretty much uneventful, and I got a ton of work done.

But we didn’t seem to be descending, not in the way I expected, not at the time I expected.  Because heightened security wasn’t enough, apparently, there was also weather near Newark.  In fact, the flight attendant told me, we’d almost gotten diverted to another airport.  As it was, we did land, a mere 32 minutes late.

Of course, I had a 35-minute layover scheduled.

And my flight to Montreal was apparently the only one in the entire airport that hadn’t been delayed.  I found this out when I called the elite help desk after we landed, telling the agent that I had less than five minutes to make my flight, if it was leaving on time.  It was.

And the only other flight that night, the 9 pm, had been cancelled.  So the soonest I could get out of Newark would be 9 am today.

I asked the agent if he could send a message to the gate, telling them that I’d be there in ten minutes.  He said he would, but warned me that they might not hold the plane, no matter what.  I promised to run.

And I did:  with my big pink briefcase over one shoulder and my laptop case over the other, and wearing my boots with the two-inch heels, I ran, from the middle of one concourse, down the connecting corridor, to the far end of the next concourse, and down the escalator to gate 115a.

Where the door was shut, and the agent was gone.

I looked sufficiently bewildered that a woman sitting nearby said “someone will be there in a minute.” “For Montreal?” I asked, pointing at the sign which indicated that the Montreal flight was leaving, like, now.

I ran over to the next gate, and got the agent’s attention, asking about the Montreal flight.  “Oh, that’s gone,” he said.

“Really?” I asked him, my desperation totally evident.  “Because they called to tell them I was coming.  And I ran.  And the last flight tonight is cancelled.” Gasping for air inbetween sentences.

And then a miracle occurred:  he picked up the phone.  Dialed some number.  Asked if Montreal was still there.  “I’ve got a runner,” he said.  And then led me over to the gate, where an agent had just re-opened the door.  He asked if I could still be gotten on the plane, and led me under the rope, down the jetway, and—amazingly—right to the still-open door of my still-waiting plane.

I thanked him profusely then, but want to do so once again:  god bless the gate agent at 114!

I plopped myself down in my seat, called R. to tell him I’d made the connection, if barely, and then proceeded to have the worst asthma attack I’ve ever had.  I don’t have asthma, at least not under normal circumstances.  But I spent the next hour-plus unable to stop coughing, and unable to catch my breath.

Aside from that, though, the flight went smoothly.  I had a little bit of bourbon—to soothe the throat and calm the nerves, you know—and a nice chat with the woman across the aisle.  And then we landed, and waited in the usual long passport control line, and headed into baggage claim.

Where, as you might expect, my suitcase did not greet me.  A very nice guy named George, though, who works for Northwest, was there, and he helped me with the paperwork.

My belongings caught up with me about an hour ago.  I spent all day today conducting interviews in the same jeans and t-shirt that I traveled in yesterday.  Now I can change my clothes, and even use the toiletries that I was able to save from TSA by checking my bag.

I’ll just say that today was not the ideal day to fly out of LAX, and leave it at that.

Confirmed and ticketed:

• August 10-15—Montréal; American Sociological Association.*
• September 28-October 6—Paris and Vienna; BlogTalk Reloaded.**
• October 26-29—Austin; Flow.

Tentative:

• August 18-23ish—New York (if meeting is scheduled).
• October 20-22—Portland; NITLE symposium on learning management systems at liberal arts colleges (if proposal is accepted).

Almost certain, but too early to make plans:

• December 18-25ish—Baton Rouge.
• December 26-29—Philadelphia, MLA.
• December 29-January somethingth—Paris.  (Yippee!)

—

*No, I haven’t changed fields; I’m on a joint search committee doing preliminary interviews there.

**The Paris part of the journey is both for fun and for economy, believe it or not.  A roundtrip ticket from SoCal to Vienna is currently in the $1300 vicinity, and requires me to fly in and out of LAX, which adds another 3 hours to the journey, and is without question the worst part of the trip.  I managed, instead, to get a roundtrip ticket on Continental from ONT to CDG for $1000 (still more than I’d like to have spent, but it has good travel times and is, alas, pretty much the going rate) and a roundtrip ticket on Air France from CDG to VIE for $175.  And all the better, I save some money on hotels, and get to hang out with my pal Marcus!

So, I’m sitting in Houston, waiting on the inbound aircraft that will take my outbound flight merrily back to the west coast. We’re going to be about an hour late. I am absolutely, positively, not complaining.

Here’s why: I don’t have the whole story as yet—I only got a somewhat garbled version from my mother—but my sister seems to have had the worst travel day ever, in the history of travel.

That, of course, is an overstatement. That little Titanic thing was probably worse. But here’s what I currently understand about her story:

She was supposed to leave New Orleans for Newark at 10 am. Weather on the east coast, not to put to fine a point on it, blows, and has blown for some time now. So no east coast flights were going anywhere. But they kept saying, oh, it’s a little delayed, no worries. And apparently, they loaded and unloaded the plane a couple of times. Why? Dunno. Mom’s semi-hysteria wouldn’t say.

In any case, they definitely loaded the plane sometime in the 4 pm vicinity, and then decided sometime after that to unload it again, but told everyone that they could leave their stuff on the plane. While they were waiting, my sister ducked into the place next door to her gate to grab something to eat on the plane—and when she got back, the plane was gone.

No boarding announcements. No announcements of any kind. If you weren’t standing in the immediate gate area, you were still in New Orleans.

And, if you were my sister, everything except your wallet was now on its way to Newark.

And your airline isn’t operating any more flights to Newark today.

Here’s the good news: she must have thrown some kind of very effective fit, because the airline (1) managed to get some subset of her stuff off the plane (I have no idea; Mom’s semi-hysteria was chilling out a bit by this point, but still wasn’t terribly clear with the details); (2) refunded the entire purchase price of her ticket, which funds she was able to use to purchase another ticket on another airline, leaving very soon thereafter and arriving at JFK; and (3) promised to gather up the rest of her stuff off the plane and make sure that it appeared at JFK when she did.

Of course, the flight to JFK was promptly delayed for two hours.

Me, I’m just sitting here. Not complaining, not one little bit.

It’s been a fabulous visit, but I’m about up to here with both the heat and the humidity. Not to mention the crazy fattening food, the omnipresent alcohol, and the general sloth. I think I need a week at a spa to recover from my weekend in Louisiana.

Fortunately, we’re headed back to California tomorrow. More, and of more substance, soon. I promise.

Two and a half hours on the runway in Houston.  Fortunately, there was beer after that.

I flew back from NYC on Monday, and have been trying to recover and unpack from the trip, as well as unpacking the stuff that arrived from Louisiana while I was gone, ever since.  I’d hoped to post this sooner, but getting the house relatively organized really had to be a priority.

In any case, three things of interest—at least to me—from the trip home:

First off, my flight left JFK at 5.25 am.  For those keeping score, that means that I was in a car on the way to the airport at 4 am, which in turn means that I got out of bed at 3.30 am.  Or at what would have been a reasonable time to go to bed on the left coast.  I’d gotten about two hours of sleep, due to my usual pre-travel insomnia, and so was, shall we say, a bit foggy in the head.  I left the apartment I was staying in dragging my rolly bag with my pink shoulder bag resting on top of it and my computer bag over my shoulder.  I was also carrying a bottle of water, with one of those sports tops.  At the elevator, I needed a free hand, so I slid the water bottle into my pink bag, pushed various buttons, got off the elevator, rolled outside, found the car service waiting for me, handed off the suitcase, took the pink bag and the computer bag, and got in the car, pulling the water bottle out of the pink bag in order to take a drink.  I then wanted to put on some lip gloss—yes, at 4 am—and so began rooting around in the bottom of the pink bag, sticking my fingers directly into about half a cup of water.  Yes, the top of the water bottle had been open.  The ride to JFK was spent attempting to dry off everything in the bag, as well as the interior of the bag itself.  Not the kind of thing that makes you feel the seasoned traveler.

Second:  JFK’s terminal 4 was all but deserted when I arrived (at about 4.30), so I breezed right through security (I’d checked in online the day before) and into the enormous shopping pen.  This is the area that served as the set for most of The Terminal, and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the hour, most bench-like flat surfaces had people lying down on them.  I couldn’t help but wonder how long they’d been there.

Finally:  I’d been upgraded, and so was one of the first people to board the plane, and was happily sitting in seat 1F waiting for the plane to roll so I could go back to sleep.  A woman got on and sat next to me in 1D, but asked whether, if no one took 1A, she could move over there.  The flight attendant said that after the flight had closed, she could, no problem, and then later told her it was okay to move.  But, it turns out, the flight hadn’t yet closed; two passengers were stuck in some protracted security thing, and (perhaps since they were supposed to be seated in first) we were waiting for them.  One of them was supposed to sit in 1A, so the same flight attendant asked him to take another seat, since the woman who had been next to me had been allowed to move.  There was some foofarah, however, about this guy’s travel companion and where she would sit, and so the flight attendant asked what seat the woman now in 1A originally had.  She said 1F.  The flight attendant pointed to me and said “that’s 1F.” The woman in 1A pulled out her 1F boarding pass, as did I, and neither of us thought much of it, because there’s always some double seat assignment thing, and there were other seats available, so no worries.  (Plus, I was there first.)

But:  the flight attendant looks at the two boarding passes, and then quickly grabs for her list of passengers.  And looks at the woman and says “what’s your last name?” The woman in 1A says that her last name is Fitzsimmons.  Except that the name on her boarding pass is Fitzpatrick.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick.  The desk agent had apparently checked her in as me, and no one caught the mistake—not the guy checking IDs and boarding passes at security, not the computer that scanned her boarding pass after already having scanned mine.  I have no idea what her final destination was, and am a bit curious whether she was able to convince someone that she really had taken the flight from JFK to IAH, or if they’d cancelled her seat on the second leg because she never got on the plane.

For the first time in, oh, a little less than five years, my flight into LaGuardia today flew straight up over Manhattan.  As in, I looked out my window, and there was the Empire State Building.  Like right there.

I’d forgotten that the routing of planes way the heck out over Jersey or Queens was a recent phenomenon.  I’d forgotten that there was a time when one could get a pretty much direct aerial view of Central Park from the window of a 737.  But today, at least, it’s back.

More from NYC soon.

Having picked up the 40 in Amarillo (despite hearing that Oklahoma City is oh-so-pretty), we sped on through Gallup, New Mexico, as well as Flagstaff, Arizona (don’t forget Winona), Kingman, Barstow –

– only to rediscover the fact that the stretch of the 15 between Barstow and San Bernadino is one of the most unattractive anywhere.  Excepted from this, of course, is the Cajon Pass, which I have a vague memory of being beautiful, but its beauty was tempered by the facts that (a) we were suddenly on a totally packed five-lane freeway, being tailgated by folks doing 90 on some quite tight turns, and (b) we were descending into air that can only be described as brown.  I’d forgotten that.

Anyhow, we made it to the area on Tuesday, and into the condo yesterday.  Today, into the office.  And very shortly, I hope, actual thinking again.

1. The rest area on Highway 287 a few miles north of Chillicothe, Texas has open wireless. I didn’t use it, but I was sorely tempted to blog from there, the middle of freaking nowhere, solely because I could.

2. I did a pre-interview with a public radio producer today, talking to him on my cell phone while riding north on Highway 64 toward the Grand Canyon. The call only dropped once.

3. The weather.com mobile site I pulled up on my cell phone earlier today told me that the low tonight at Grand Canyon, AZ, would be 26 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, weather.com accessed through my browser confirms this. But the local news says it will be 38. The difference? The north rim is 1000 feet higher, and averages 10 degrees cooler.

Some stuff, I guess, technology can’t yet deal with.

(Should be arriving in SoCal tomorrow, and home on Wednesday. More then.)