Now here’s when the vacation really started. I got up at 6:30 am and finished packing my stuff. Drank some coffee. Read the paper. I was showered, dressed to fly, refreshed, and on I-75 North to I-10 East by 8:30 am. Ack! What an unbearably boring drive. Hung over. Anticipating burning wreckage.
A n y w a y … I was at the Jacksonville airport by 10:30 am, drove lost around the construction of new parking lots until I figured out where the place you’re supposed to leave your car was, and was on the plane by 11 am. I used priceline.com and got an eTicket from Delta. Now, I am a sucker for most eThings, but I have to tell you that this eTicket idea is really the best way to fly. If you’re not checking any bags onto the flight, you don’t have to stand in any lines or do any snookering. You just get to the airport and get on the plane. If I had remembered to bring my SkyMiles plastic card I even would have been able to use the little ATM-type terminal to get my boarding pass! Very cool.
I got an aisle seat which is good for people that don’t mind trading extra leg room for getting your knee whacked by the drink cart every now and then. On the short hop from Jacksonville to Atlanta, not one interesting thing happened. I will not even tell you how much of nothing happened, that’s how little happened. It was so boring that, as soon as I scored 508348 points on 420 lines and finished on level 30 on my teal Color Gameboy Tetris, I slept right through my Delta-provided nutritionally-balanced breakfast-slash-lunch snack extravaganza. I was in the first row behind the first row behind first class on a 757.
This is one of those planes where you board at the stewardess’ station between first class and plebe class. During the hour-long layover in Atlanta I opted to lay out on all three seats rather than get off the plane and wander around an Atlanta airport that I have become all-too-familiar with in the last year or so. Some of the stewardesses didn’t see me sprawled there and started talking smack about some of the passengers from the previous flight. Apparently all the stewardesses had just seen Erin Brokavich (or whatever the new Julia Roberts movie is) and so they were all swearing like sailors. I thought it was pretty funny, but when they finally saw me sitting there they freaked out and started apologizing. Like I was going to get upset with them or go tell someone! Whatever, y’know? Like I care.
So … we get menus as the new parade of people boards for the trip from ATL to LAX. The choices are chicken or steak. There are some things that are just too strange to believe, and the idea that I might get a decent steak on an airplane is one of them. When they started … more to come!