Travel Day!!

Phase One of the Great Graduation Tour of 2013 is coming to a close. (Congratulations, Brie!!) We’re at ORF nice and early, chilling before the flight to DFW (we hope) and the connection to LAX (we hope).

The “hope” part comes from the current weather here in coastal Virginia:

Those are some big thunderheads!

I enjoy non-boring weather (one of many reasons to look forward eagerly to the day when we leave Los Angeles for good) and we’ve had plenty of that today with a mix of sunshine, showers, lightning, thunder, and frog-drowner downpours. Fun and non-boring, but sometimes not so good for keeping the planes running on time.

I also now realize that I could have done a better job in planning this trip. My bad — not up to my usual standards.

First of all, we could have gone down to Raleigh and seen Brad Paisley if we really wanted to. While we were there we could have gone to my high school friend’s house and emailed her a picture of us standing on her front porch looking forlorn. (She invited us to come and visit the last time we were in Virginia and we knew she was out of town this weekend. Sorry, Maria! I try to never pass up a good gag!)

Secondly, we’re not on a tight schedule to get home and our beloved Angels are in Baltimore starting tonight to play the Orioles. We’ve seen the Angels play the Red Sox in Boston, the White Sox in Chicago, and the Mariners in Seattle, so if I had known we would have stayed the extra day and driven up to Baltimore to see them. (On the other hand, looking at the downpour outside at the moment, maybe not…)

Thirdly, we normally take the 6AM flight out of ORF, and while getting up at 3AM to get that flight isn’t my idea of a good time, it does get us back into LAX around noon with most of the day still ahead of us. Somehow I got us on the 6PM flight, which gets us back in after midnight. It was great to sleep in this morning, we did get to say goodbye to The Long Suffering Niece #3 and The Long Suffering Sister-In-Law, we got a leisurely lunch, and we got to see exciting weather. But it feels like we’re a bit “off” on this schedule.

Maybe I’m feeling discombobulated because we’re not suffering enough. Maybe it’s a “recovering Catholic” thing.

Speaking of being discombobulated, check out the conversation this morning on Amanda Palmer’s Twitter feed. She had a picture and many comments about the area in the Milwaukee airport where you can get redressed and reorganized after going through the TSA line. It’s clearly labeled as a “Recombobulation Area” – that’s very, very clever!

Finally, here at the gate in ORF they’re playing Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie and other 40’s music — no Kenny G to be found. It’s all good!!