41 days later

More than a month ago, I drove away from Philadelphia with the kiddos upon the conclusion of a long but fruitful vacation. Here I am now, 41 days later, back in Philly, at the same hotel even, for a wedding tomorrow morning. Here's some observations from my travels...

Philly shuttle in OKC?
When I parked my car at the airport and got on the shuttle to the terminal, I was shocked to have felt like I was already in Philly. I mean, this is Oklahoma, the land of courteous, smiling, country folk, right? Well, it sure didn't seem that way. The guy sitting across from me on the shuttle had his feet a little bit in the aisle, and another guy that got on the shuttle after stepping over the other guy's feet said out loud, "don't make any effort to move your feet or anything." I couldn't believe it. That's something I would have expected in Philly, but is quite atypical in OKC.

Sometimes second guesses work out
When I was scheduling my flight to Philly, I had two connecting city choices, Atlanta and Cincinnati. I originally chose Atlanta to make my connection, but I changed it to Cincinnai to tweak my arrival time in Philadelphia. Had I not done that, my flight would have been delayed significantly as there was 5" of rain in Atlanta as a result of the remnants of hurricane Ivan.

That's some flight, wish I were on it
While I was on a bus traversing between terminal C and terminal A to get to my connecting flight, I noticed a Delta airplane on the tarmac (i.e. not a private jet) with what looked like a pallet's worth of gatorade on the conveyor belt leading to the cargo hold. I've yet to be on a Delta flight with gatorade as one of the beverage choices. I then noticed several coach buses parked next to the plane, which seemed peculiar, but what do I know. I have no idea what that plane was for, but I would pretty much guess it was for a sports team. I poked around a little bit when I got to my terminal but didn't see any clues.

Long layovers
There's good and bad in them. With short layovers, sometimes you barely have time to make your connection, so you're back on the road in no time, but you also don't get to do much if anything else. With the longer variety, you don't have to be in such a rush, and you often even have time for a meal, but there's only so much of a good thing you can take. My layover in Cincinnati, for example, was 2.5 hours. Sheesh. And then we were stuck on the runway for a bit, so my layover was just about as long as the combined flight times of both legs of the trip. I think that is probably pushing it, for your trip to be twice as long as it needed to be.

Airplane seatbelts, do we need them?
If you've ever seen the Seinfeld HBO special where he goes on about the silly need to wear a helmet when you sky dive, you'll know where I'm coming from. Now, I know there's turbulence on flights sometimes, but in all my years of flying I've never been in such turbulence that I needed a seatbelt to hold me down. Now, in a car, where survivability is likely after a crash, I don't question the need for seatbelts. But I got to thinking today on the plane... you know, if it got to the point where we were going to crash, I'm pretty sure the seatbelt wouldn't help much.

Scenic Philly
I caught a shuttle service from the airport to my hotel, but there were several other stops before me (as my hotel is about the furthest you can get on the other side of Philly from the airport while still actually being in Philly). It took more than an hour to get to the hotel, but it wasn't so bad as I got to cruise around Philly and take in the sights. Typically I'm driving when I'm in Philly and it was nice to not be driving but rather getting to enjoy the view(s).