Friday, October 06, 2006

Travels with Tadcranky
I spent most of Thursday traveling across the country to Palm Springs. Air travel is generally pretty fascinating to me -- a zillion stressed out strangers thrown together, you never know what will happen.

Thursday went fairly well. I got yelled at by a security guy at National Airport, because I didn't properly stow my laptop in the bin that goes through the X-ray machine for belongings. After I had passed through the X-ray machine for people, I hear the guy ask "Who's laptop is this?" About five people raised their hands. Turns out he was talking about mine. After this was determined, he yelled at me because, evidently, laptops are supposed to be taken out of the case (mine was) and put in a seperate bin (I just put mine in a bin on top of the case). Hell, I don't know. This is why I exactly why I don't like to travel with a computer. I pointed out to him that I must have missed the sign that said that (there were none). He kind of scowled at me, and I scowled back.

I flew in to Dallas, and had a couple of hours layover, which I did on purpose as I knew I wouldn't be into the usual Dallas airport connection scenario of the plane arriving late, and me having to run about two miles and either miss my connection or getting there late and sweaty. So I found a bar with an empty stool, and watched the very end of the Yankees loss. Yay.

The bar was relatively cool, with two female bartenders with stripper hair who were generally not around, so the barback ended up making me my drinks. He looked to be about 19, and he had this strange thing with a shot glass with salt around the rim. He'd hold the glass to his mouth, and eat/lick the salt. Kids these days.

Sitting at the bar, I was flanked by two pairs of strangers. On one side, one guy spent about an hour detailing the cultural attractions of Orlando, Florida, to the woman sitting next to him. There's the obvious problem with that (Orlando culture? Gator World is cool though.), then there is the fact that the woman that he was talking to was from North Carolina, and the guy was talking to her like she was from Singapore. I really doubt that Orlando is that mysterious a place to someone from North Carolina. After a while, of course, they started to talk about real estate. The couple on the other side just talked about real estate the whole time. Jeez.

So, uh, several Jack and cokes later, I headed to my plane, on my way to Palm Springs, which is every bit the cultural mecca that Orlando is. More on that later.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hear ya on the overuse of real estate as a topic of conversation, although I'll take that over discussions of reality TV shows.

So, any opinions on the VA Senate race?

tadcranky said...

I have a hard time thinking of anyone I have more disgust for than George Allen, although I wish there was a better candidate than Webb. And it's amazing to me that it's not. I'm an election official in my district, and I'm looking forward to an interesting day...

Anonymous said...

I'm with you on both counts, although I didn't think much of Harris Miller either - too much baggage with him being a lobbyist. Although it could've made the discovery of Allen's Jewish roots even more interesting...