As Far As You Know

After getting home at about 10:30 p.m. last night, having spent most of the day up in Exeter, New Hampshire with the squash team, I had to get packed for a two-week swing through California and Miami. As my flight is scheduled for the ungodly hour of 6:05 this morning, I figured I could take my time, as going to bed would be pointless (and possibly a costly error if I were to sleep through my alarm). While driving up Interstate 91 at 3:30 in the morning, I noticed how unusually free of traffic the highway was. I was reminded of driving through the night on other trips I've taken: down the Pacific Coast Highway in California, from Sydney to Melbourne, and from Heathrow Airport to the northernmost tip of Scotland. I sorta like staying up late to drive, then crashing for a couple of hours on the side of the road.

Anyway, I am heading to San Francisco via Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles. Hopefully the warmer weather will knock out this cough that has been lingering in my system the last week or so.

The world tour begins.

I am in Bradley Airport, getting ready to head to Hong Kong via Chicago and Tokyo. I'll update when I arrive.

Until then, Merry Christmas everybody!

I stayed up all night, figuring I'd deny myself the chance to oversleep my early morning trip to Bradley Airport. After the frenetic tournament weekend and a day full of meetings on Monday, this gave me the chance to sort the mail, do the laundry, pack and tackle a few other projects with no interruption before heading off again for another three weeks on the road. I fly to see my folks in south Florida before a week in Aruba and a week with the Choate tennis team back at Saddlebrook.

As I am sitting in Bradley Airport, waiting for my flight to Miami, there's only one tune for the day: Jimmy Buffett's "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes."

I'm about to board a plane to the Windy City, so here is "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" by the band Chicago.

Jackson Browne was one of the best of the singer-songwriters who rose to prominence in the early 1970s. This song, "These Days," is a compelling reason why.

After a slow (30mph) drive up Interstate 91 through the storm, I arrived at Bradley Airport this morning knowing that my 9:12am flight to Detroit (for a connection to Nashville) was canceled. The Northwest Airlines rep I spoke to last night suggested I might have a shot at getting on a 12:30 flight, though, which would get me to my final destination around 4:30. SInce I am supposed to be taking a 4-hour course on legal issues in athletics that starts at 4:30, this midday departure might have gotten me where I needed to be, at least for most of the session. But that flight was wiped out by the weather, too, so I am here until a 4 p.m. flight and should arrive in Nashville a bit before 8pm.

After eight hours in Bradley Airport, it became clear there was no way I was going to make it to Nashville today. So I "volunteered" my seat, got a free round-trip ticket, a free night in a local hotel plus two meals, and a rebooked flight first thing in the morning.

Fortunately the hotel here in Windsor Locks has HBO, so I got to see the wrap-up of the Ricky Gervais series Extras--an extended "Christmas special" episode following two seasons, just like what he did for the Brit version of The Office--without waiting until Tuesday night to see it on my DVR (or I guess it would be available on Comcast On Demand, too). It's cool how he and Stephen Merchant get English celebrities to appear in totally self-deprecating roles. The show was typical Gervais humor: painful, awful hilarious, embarrassing moments of awkwardness punctuated in the end by deep-down-inside sweetness.

I am back at Bradley Airport, getting ready to fly to Las Vegas via Milwaukee. The airport is pretty deserted this time of day. Even though it's supposedly a heavy travel date, I guess most flights took off or arrived earlier in the day. I checked in about 45 minutes before my scheduled departure and was the only person going through security. A nice change of pace from the usual airport routine!

At Bradley Airport right now for a 5:30 a.m. flight to Philadelphia, where I will connect to a flight to Denver. I will end the day in Ashland, Oregon--home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

I just finished a morning practice with the team and scooted up to Bradley Airport for a 2:15 flight. As this is the one weekend of the fall without a cross country meet, I am sneaking away to Chicago for a quick getaway.

Having not gotten a lot of sleep the last two nights, complicated by my body still being on U.K. time, I decided to catch a few hours of sleep between 7 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. before packing my bags and heading to Bradley Airport for my 5:30 departure. I had to plan this carefully because the shift to Daylight Savings Time robbed me of an hour I otherwise could have used for some more shuteye. But I stupidly set the alarm clock for 12:50 p.m. and since it didn't go off, I was lucky to wake up on my own about an hour later, which gave me about 45 minutes to get my act together for a week in Jamaica. Fortunately, I made it to the airport in time, had an easy time checking in, and am about to fly to Philadelphia to catch my connection to Montego Bay.

I had missed the news that Terminal B at Bradley Airport was being mothballed. All airlines leave from the expanded and much more modern Terminal A now and Terminal B (which I never cared for all that much) is slated for demolition.