All-Stars at the St Louis Airport

I’ve been in St Louis today working with a customer. It wasn’t until I arrived that I learned that the All-Star Game is going on tonight, and that the President is scheduled to attend. My flight leaves at 4:40 PM CST, which is just about the time Air Force One is supposed to arrive. So I’ll either get out of here on time, or I’ll get to see the most powerful jet in the world land, and maybe catch a glimpse of the first President I voted for. Good times!

Hotel TVs...WTF?

If you travel at all, you've probably encountered the LodgeNet Remote. It's a TV remote that many hotel chains use to add pay-per-view movies and games to their TVs. And it's an absolute piece of shit that needs to die an agonizing death. It's clunky, it doesn't work right, and it slows down the TV. Tell me this: should a remote take 3-4 seconds to change a channel? Should it require you to wait a full second between pushing successive buttons (like when switching to a double-digit channel)? And most of all, shouldn't a TV remember the last channel you were on instead of resetting back to the annoying hotel ad channel? Yeah. I thought so.

I'm stuck at a Hilton in Austin, TX and the LodgeNet remote has been pissing me off. So has the ungodly slow internet access that requires me to log in via proxy every 30 minutes. All of this idiocy just so that Paris Hilton can make a lame sex tape and spend money she didn't earn...if ever we needed more evidence that the inheritance tax is a good thing.

Mad Dash for Midway

The trip to Lincoln's Birthplace was harrowing, the stay stressful, and the return hectic. But somehow it worked. My original itinerary had me flying SFO-ORD-SPI on Monday, SPI-ORD-SFO on Tuesday evening. We got into Springfield and things weren't going so well. I wasn't prepared for the work I had come to do, and stayed up half the night worrying. A crappy hotel didn't help matters. But we woke up, did the work we came to do, came out of it well, and had some time to kill.

My boss and I decided to hit the Abe Lincoln presidential library and museum in downtown Springfield to see what it was about. The tour was interesting, with several good wax figure displays and narrations. The boss and I took off for the airport after about an hour.

Normally, United notifies you by text message when a flight is delayed. I got no such message, and arrived at the airport to find the flight delayed well past 7. That would have put me at ORD with too little time to connect to my SFO flight. Damn...I didn't want to spend the night in SPringfield or Chicago, since I have to travel again Thursday. Other airlines didn't pan out, so I told my boss that we shoudl drive. Screw it...into another rental car, one way to ORD. Then we realized we couldn't make it. So we spent time on the phone with our travel agent, trying to arrange flights out of MDW...and return the rental car there....all of this at 90+mph while watching for law enforcement types... We were sweating the arrival time: it was going to be very close. More than once, the boss commented that we weren't going to make it.

Needless to say, the travel agent came through, got us both booked onto flights...the boss to Providence, and me to OAK. I screeched to a stop at the MDW rental car return with 15 minutes till departure, ran to get my boarding pass, ran to security, ran to the gate, and made the flight with a few minutes to spare...plus I got home much earlier than I would have otherwise.

My routing looked like this. It was one of the more interesting logistical adventures I ever had.