Today is my big travel day. Or, at least, the beginning of the big travel weekend. Starting tonight I’m on the move pretty much constantly until Sunday afternoon. This is going to be a long, long weekend.
Work was pretty busy today but not awful. I went in to the office as usual. My traveling does not begin until pretty late this evening so my day is not really affected.
For lunch today I ran home and spent some time with Dominica and Liesl since I will not be seeing them tomorrow. We decided that I would drive myself back to the office after lunch and that if I got done with work early enough that I would drive home and if not that Dominica would pick me up at the office and take me to the airport and we would just leave the Mazda at the office over the weekend.
The afternoon was completely crazy at work. What a busy day. My deployments this evening took two and a half solid hours without a spare second for me to stop and catch up. It was maddening. What a way to wear yourself out at the end of the day.
I managed to wrap up work just in time to run out, jump in the Mazda, drive to the house and have Dominica and Liesl drive me over to DFW to prepare for my flight. Dominica had all of my stuff packed and ready to go.
I got to the airport two hours early – which has always been more than enough at DFW. You move through security in around ten minutes there consistently. It has never been an issue for me at all and now that we use that airport so often we are really getting good at getting in and out without too much problem. I still like to leave plenty of extra time just in case. Nothing worse than missing a flight as Dominica and I found out in England.
So I had lots of time which worked out well since I had not eaten since breakfast. I hit the Tequilaria and grabbed a beer and a salmon quesadilla which was excellent. It took so long to get the food that it killed about forty five minutes. I had time to burn so that wasn’t an issue. I ate and then headed over to the gate which was just a few feet away.
The flight boarded on time and was scheduled to be down the runway at nine thirty but we ended up having ground crew problems and it took over an hour and a half for the ground crew to get around to getting us underway. Not an impressive ground crew.
We finally got into the air sometime after eleven central time. This is going to be one long, exhausting weekend. That hour and a half delay came straight out of my very limited sleep schedule for the weekend.
Other than the delays on the ground in Dallas there were no issues with the flight. I arrived only an hour and ten minutes late in Baltimore. John picked me up in his new Toyota FJ Cruiser and we hit the gas station, got sandwiches and headed back to his place.
I was finally in bed around three thirty. Nila was, of course, waiting for me and came up and got into bed with me. She is the funniest cat ever. She really misses me whenever I am away from Maryland. She never leaves my side while I am there.
It took me until around four before I actually fell asleep. Boy oh boy is this going to be one long day tomorrow. Brian emailed me just before I fell asleep to tell me that he had just woken up but was going back to sleep rather than driving down to get me right away. Probably best. I need some amount of sleep or I will be useless tomorrow.