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I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t travel all that much. Sure, I’ve been to Greece and Spain but those were big occasion kind of trips - I don’t really travel for work. Today I took what is normally a short, trivial hop from good old MSP to ORD. Heck, the Twin Cities is so close to Chicago, you could practically fly down for lunch! But of course that wasn’t about to happen tonight…oh no.

As I suspect a few of you know the Wyndham O’Hare is host to the first annual RailsConf (and if the ride over from the airport is any indication - we’ve got some serious alpha geeks in the hizzie). Ordinarily, I would expect to make the hop in about 45 minutes or an hour but you see, we had some “weather” in the midwest today and apparently O’Hare “fell behind” a bit. We were delayed leaving the big Minnie - well, we pushed off from the gate just a few minutes late but of course we had to take a tour of the airport (seriously, who in their right mind thinks of departure time as when the doors are shut?) Basically, we were nearly 45 minutes late just getting in the air.

Of course the delay gave us some time to play the Tetris game that is carryon bags and the overhead bins. Maybe we’re just too nice here in flyover land but when I left San Francisco, they were checking bag size pretty carefully - if it didn’t fit in the box, it was getting checked. Clearly, whomever is responsible for that in our neck of the woods has Wednesdays off because some of the bags people tried to smuggle on board would comfortably fit the Stanley Cup.

This being a short flight, most people didn’t want to check their bags further exacerbating the situation. The *packed* flight combined with bags that really should have been checked (seriously, if you can’t put the bag in perpendicular to the bin and still shut the door, it’s just too big) meant we had a few crabby campers on board (I thought one guy was going to throw some punches - he was *not* happy that his sacred bag was being checked. Never mind that it was too big to fit in the bin…). Eventually we were in the air and after failing at a Sudoko (man, Will Shortz must just weigh his cash - I swear every third person was working through one of his books), I was pleased when the pilot said he was beginning his decent into O’Hare.

I’ll have to ask Ryan for clarification, but I think this is pilot code for “we’ll be in the air for another 45 minutes” because shortly after giving us all some false hope, he reported (from the flight-deck) that we were in a holding pattern waiting for ORD to “catch up” with their backlog. Sigh. I got really excited when he told the flight crew to prepare for landing - which again, must be code for “don’t tell the chattel, err passengers, but we’ve got another 30 minutes”. Eventually we did land - more than an hour late, after being locked in a tin can for more than 2 hours (man, another hour or so and I could have been in California) we were on the ground in the windy city, happy days, the ordeal was over!

Ahh, but there was a catch. You see, apparently O’Hare only has one or two jet-ways (it’s not that big an airport I guess) and, well, we pulled up to a gate that didn’t have one so we were just going to have to sit and wait until the ground crew “got around” to bringing one over (perhaps from Midway). Amazingly, this only took about 10 minutes but by now, I was convinced that driving would have not only been faster, but much less stressful (though it would have cost more when you factor in parking and gas). We were finally able to deplane (wow, according to my spell checker, that’s really a word) and amazingly our luggage wasn’t lost (don’t laugh, it’s happened to me…on a trip to Chicago). Of course it took us a while to find the magic “door number one” where our shuttle would whisk us away to the hotel. As you would expect, we just missed the van so it was the full 15-20 minutes watching anxiously (we looked like puppies and kittens at the shelter) as van after van drove by. I guess a mess of huddled geeks just isn’t as irresistible as a small ball of fur…

Of course we did finally get the hotel - more than five hours after starting our journey (any longer and I would have thought I was in a Greek tragedy); while I don’t think I would have actually driven down, flying didn’t save me that much. Oh well, I’m here and I’m pumped about RailsConf! I’ll do my best to blog along (and unlike JavaOne, I’m wired up - it only took me 20 minutes, and Safari, to get my complimentary wifi hookup. But hey, I’ve got an Aeron so whose complaining?) All right, I’m crawling into bed…