So, if you’ve seen me in person some time in the past week, I’ll probably have gushed to you about the fact that I’m incredibly lucky to be going to SOSP 2007, at Skamania Lodge, Stevenson, WA. I’ve been up for 22 hours now, and my luck is giving way to psychosis.
Up at 4:30am, I left my (new-but-that’s-another-story) house at 6, caught the 6:30 bus from Cambridge to Gatwick (and was dismayed at the lack hostess, jolly or otherwise, on the National Express), then left Gatwick at 12:45 on an American Airlines flight to Raleigh/Durham, NC. Those with a keen, or even extremely vague, sense of geography will see immediately the flaw in my plan!
The transatlantic leg was fine, nothing special, and I got a good amount of work done on the plane. Arriving at the backwoods “Raleigh/Durham International Airport” was something of a come down. I’m no stranger to queues at immigration (although the hall was so small that they had to let us off the plane in stages), or having to recheck my luggage having cleared customs, but I was dismayed to find that, after doing this, all 300 tired and cranky passengers off the fully-loaded 777 were forced through a full laptops-out, shoes-off security checkpoint, even if they were leaving the airport! A little artefact of those halcyon pre-9/11 days when airport security was such that the entire townsfolk would congregate in the departure lounge for a barn dance….
Two hours there, and a bag of Fritos later, I was on another flight, this time to Dallas Fort Worth. A narcoleptic episode beginning just before take-off left me quite disoriented, but now I’m at DFW, tapping out an unnecessarily sardonic blog post, just trying to stay awake and not miss my four-hour flight to Portland. If you’re reading this, Henry, the AAdvantage miles just weren’t worth it.
I feel better about having lost my advantage card now.