The reason this blog post is a little late is because I was away this weekend.  Specifically I traveled back home for my mother’s birthday.  Suffice it to say it was a good time.  The party was great and I got to eat myself into a food coma two days in a row. 

However the actual act of traveling is another matter entirely.  I flew Delta into LaGuardia.  There was quite a bit of rain in the New York area Friday.  Knowing this I was sure my flight would be delayed if not cancelled entirely.  That didn’t happen and in fact we left Memphis on time.  The trip was a bit bumpy, but we landed in New York City exactly when we should have.  Normally that is the end of things.  You mosey on over to the gate and enjoy your journey.  Normally.   What happened instead was that the plane sat on the runway for nearly two hours.  Apparently there were far more planes than gates.  Worse, we were on the wrong side of the airport so there really was no where else to go.  Eventually the powers that be sent us to a different gate.  My arrival time had been 6:30 PM.  I didn’t set foot in the airport almost 8:30.  Epic Fail.

I’m not sure whether to blame Delta or LaGuardia.  Somebody clearly let too many planes land.  I am no expert, but usually flights are cancelled in order to avoid such a situation (this actually happened to me while returning from Florida a few years ago).  Of course since mine was not among them I probably shouldn’t complain too loudly. 

Going back was much better.   I on an actual Delta flight (the previous one which was delayed was operated by one of their partners – Express Jet I believe).  We were delayed by a few minutes by a radar outage, but ultimately got into Memphis right on time.  Furthermore the drive back to Cleveland was not as bad as I’d feared.  You see the airport in Memphis is over 100 miles from where I live.  That’s about a two hour drive.  Fortunately there weren’t many people on the Highway yesterday.   In fact there were probably more bugs than cars.  There were so many hitting my windshield that I actually thought it was raining at one point.  Thankfully it is pouring now so hopefully there will be no need to go to the car wash.

This week will see me traveling again.  I will be heading to New Orleans for a conference starting Wednesday.  I’ll have more about that next weekend.