Travel Thoughts

Everyone has horror stories about travel, especially during the winter when flights are canceled and you find yourself stranded thousands of miles from home. This isn't one of those stories. Instead, I thought it might be nice to share a couple of nice travel tales from my recent past, when I traveled from Boston to Aspen to Chicago to Buffalo, back to Boston, to Mt. Kisco, NY back to Boston, then on to Atlanta to Fort Pierce, FL and then finally home again to Boston.

The Jewish karma in me says I probably shouldn't say this out loud because it's bad luck, but sometimes you just have to. All my flights in that 2 week stretch were on time. And, I don't mean "relatively" on time, I mean they were either early (and we had to wait for a gate), or the plane pulled up to the gate when the airline said it would.

A few weeks earlier, when changing planes in Chicago with just enough time to grab a sandwich for lunch, my colleague Tom and I kept walking past all the fast-food chains at O'Hare thinking/hoping that maybe a better option would present itself before we got to our gate. We found a little Greek place that was perfect. I had a great chicken kabob wrap and they tossed some hummus on it without any extra charge. I turned to Tom and said, "I bet they do a great breakfast."

Well, last week, I manged to beat morning traffic back to O'Hare and had some extra time before my 8am flight and went looking for the Greek spot, but I couldn't recall exactly where it was. All I could remember was that it was way down the E or F concourse. So, I schlepped all the way down F, found nothing and turned back. I walked up to a couple of gate agents chatting and said "There's a great little Gree.."
Before I could finish the question, they said "It's across from E8; we're going over in about 10 minutes." Just to confirm, they do make a fantastic Greek omlet."

This is a a little shout-out to the TSA folks at ATL. This past Wednesday morning, during a generally busy morning rush at one of the busiest airports in the country, the security check point had a sufficient number of screeners on the floor, and enough lines open to get people thru security in just minutes.

We all know airport security makes little sense in terms of actually deterring a terrorist, but it's something we all put up with. In this case, getting through security efficiently just made all that travel a little easier.