| Sunday, March 25, 2007 |
17:24 - I Love L.A...?
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Man, I haven't been here in a while. I'm in a layover on the way back from a very pleasant four-day weekend visiting my brother and his wife in Atlanta. Very uneventful traveling so far, except that the Atlanta-to-LA 767 leg was carrying about ten Army soldiers returning from Iraq, which the captain pointed out with great pride, and which earned the uniformed dudes and gals in question a round of drinks from someone in first class, not to mention everyone sitting back and waiting for them to deplane at the gate first, applauding until the last of them had exited, which I thought was pretty cool. "There is no exit strategy", indeed...
Anyway, the fact that Delta seems to achieve its global coverage these days by partnering with every other airline under the sun means that the LA-to-San Jose leg is run by American Eagle, which means I got to take a shuttle bus out on the tarmac to an entirely different terminal, a little ground-level island in the asphalt surrounded by little commuter jets and prop-driven snubby things, and I'll be waiting here for the next hour and a half. Since I've been up since 6:00AM Eastern this morning, I'm hoping I don't zonk out and miss my connection—but I get the impression that nobody really stands on ceremony with these planes, and there'll be another one along eventually. If there'd been an earlier flight to San Jose from here, they'd have bustled me onto it, gel-filled tubes in my bags or not. This'll be a first for me—I've flown on big jets and I've flown on Cessnas, but never anything in between.
This T-Mobile Hotspot service blocks ping and AIM, but not Google Earth, so I'll be pleasantly occupied under the blanket of smog here until I rise out of it and can download some photos to upload. (After which I get to try to figure out why my Canon 10D's LCD stopped working right when we arrived at the end of the Raven Cliffs Trail in the Blue Ridge foothills...)
...Well, okay, since I've already downloaded them to this laptop anyway: here's the Georgia Aquarium...
The megachurch movement is booming (this one, like many, is under construction), and it's funny—it wasn't like in Borat at all:
My hosts doing one of their live music performances at a local coffee concern:
And here's the cliff and trail where my camera seems to have discovered that it was no longer under warranty (the pictures I sorta-took-but-not-really-I-guess after this one were, of course, much better):
At the risk of repeating myself, a very pleasant trip, not least because it's a rare opportunity for me to really shift my perspective and indulge in various ruminations that I may or may not expound upon later. Great visiting, great hiking, great relaxing. And if nothing else, I got to see the famous Williams Street studios, if just from the freeway...
UPDATE: Another side effect of Delta partnering with every other airline in the world is that whereas my ride was waiting for me at the Terminal C (every airline but Southwest and American) baggage claim, which is at the extreme south end of the San Jose airport, my American Eagle flight dropped me at the far northern end of Terminal A—the farthest possible point in the entire airport from where I needed to be. I landed spot-on the predicted time, but I had to run all the way to the inter-terminal shuttle bus stop, watch the inter-terminal bus roll by just soon enough for me to miss it, and then wait the 15 minutes it took to realize that, inexplicably, the inter-terminal bus is the least frequently run bus in the entire circuit (both rental-car buses and several connection buses went around and passed me more than once) and shoulder my bags and run the quarter-mile to the Terminal C baggage claim.
Yeah I'm glad to be home, but you ducks are really trying my patience.
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Brian Tiemann
