About > Travel Reflections

Europe 2002

May 2002 marked my first trip to Europe. As part of my duties as a project manager with Beckman Coulter, I presented a short-course to our European User Group Meeting in Salzburg, Austria. As an introduction to European travel, this was perfect. The weather in Austria was wonderful, the scenery is beautiful, and I was able to schedule a side trip to Munich, Germany.

I was back again in Europe on business in October 2002. This time, destinations included Zagreb, Croatia and Oss, The Netherlands.

Croatia was nicer than I expected. Some of my coworkers from Beckman had already been to Zagreb, but I still didn't know what I was getting myself into by agreeing to come. I found a warm people in country where I felt safe. It was an interesting mix of post-Communist Eastern Europe and an emerging Western society. Many people, especially young folks, speak English. The food is decent, the prices are reasonable (except for taxi service, which is highly variable), and the water is safe to drink.

The week I was visiting, Croatia was celebrating its 11th year of independence from the former Yugoslavia. Though a war continues in its neighbor, Bosnia, the region of Croatia where I visited showed no effects of the not-so-distant civil war. They tell me that only two shells landed in Zagreb during the war -- one of which landed within meters of the US Embassy.

After five days in Zagreb, followed by five days in the suburbs of Munich, I was off to Amsterdam. The architecture was beautiful, and I can only imagine how pretty this city is in the springtime or summer months. When I visited, it was getting chilly (though the locals didn't yet think so), and was mostly overcast. The weather was nicer in Oss, a city of about 50,000 about 90 minutes southeast of Amsterdam.

Seattle 2003

As of September 2003 I've checked Washington off my list of US states to visit. Similar to the short-course I presented in Austria, I gave another course to the US User Group Meeting in Seattle in September. The weather in Seattle was uncharacteristically sunny the entire week -- not a drop of rain! They say that Seattle normally has 270 overcast days per year. Still on the list of states to visit: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Alaska, Alabama, and Mississippi.

While in Seattle, I did something that I've wanted to do for years: jump out of a perfectly good airplane. While most people are quite content to sit in a plane and look down at the ground, I wanted to know what it was like to fall towards the ground from 13,000 feet. This first jump was a tandem, meaning that someone was strapped to my back. He was the one with the parachute, and the one totally in control of our fate. The experience was amazing, though I'm not sure that I'd do it again. Granted, it was a thrill, and I had a smile on my face the entire day afterwards. What actually compelled me to finally take the plunge? I can blame it all on one of my customers. Tom Jones from DuPont is an avid skydiver. Having mentioned to him at some point that it was something I wanted to do, he eagerly invited me to join him and his wife as they spent the afternoon jumping in Kapowsin, about 90 minutes south of Seattle. In retrospect, I couldn't have asked for a more beautiful place for my introduction to skydiving. With the beautiful mountains (Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker, Mt. Saint Helens, etc.) in the background, it was breathtaking. The view from that height was so beautiful, I hitched a ride on another flight with the jump plane just to take pictures of the scenery.

Texas 2003 - Part 1: Waco

It's always an adventure to head out on business travel. I've been stranded on the road before, but not like this... What should have been a short 1.5 day meeting in Waco, Texas turned into a 3-day ordeal. The trip out to Waco was rather uneventful. However, the return was a nightmare. My coworker, AnnMarie, and I were scheduled to leave Dallas at 4:45pm on Wednesday, March 19, flying through Atlanta on Delta. We arrived at the airport early enough to try to get on a 2:30 flight, but were told that was sold out. The agent offered us a 3:30 flight, but it would cost $50 each, and the connection from Atlanta to Newark would have been the same, so we stuck it out in Dallas and had a leisurely lunch. Wandering back to the gate where our 4:45 flight was scheduled to depart, we noticed an updated departure time of 5:30. This was bad news since we would absolutely miss our connecting flight. Thankfully, we were keen enough to inquire, and were sent to the gate where the 3:30 flight was boarding. Realizing that the updated departure time for this flight was now 4:30, we hoped that our connection in Atlanta would be available. The ironic thing about the situation is that we boarded the plane for no additional charge.

Our seats aboard the Boeing 767 weren't ideal -- the middle seats for both of us, just a few rows apart. But, hey, we were going somewhere -- or so we thought. Atlanta was apparently having very nasty weather, we hung around Dallas for a while before they released us to take off. We finally did take off, and got more than half-way to Atlanta before the pilot announced that we had been placed in a holding pattern due to the weather in Atlanta. He reported that they were down to one usable runway.

To add to the surreality of the situation, the James Bond movie "Die Another Day" was played during the flight to occupy us. It was during one scene that 007 was being chased across an icy lake that the flight felt more like an amusement park ride and less like a commercial flight. The pitching and heaving of the plane seemed to mimic the action on the screen. I can only imagine that someone got the idea for the 3D motion simulators during a similar experience.

After circling for a while, the pilot announced that our fuel reserves were running low, and that we'd been diverted to Birmingham, Alabama, where we could refuel. The plan was to stay in Birmingham until Atlanta reopened, as Atlanta was now completely shut down.

Birmingham is not a large airport. And our plane couldn't be refueled until we were parked at a gate, which were already full of other planes in similar situations. After sitting on the tarmac for a while, a gate finally opened up and we were able to refuel.

It's hard to know how frequent travelers survived before cell phones. Everybody aboard the flight had a cell phone, and was using them to phone friends, family, and their car service. I called my parents to proudly announce that I could cross Alabama off the list of nine states I hadn't yet been to.

After another long ground hold, we were eventually cleared to take off. It was during this flight between Birmingham and Atlanta that I believe our aircraft was struck by lightning. Planes are struck more than people realize. A bright flash of light that enveloped the plane and an accompanying"bang" noise that I initially thought was the landing gear locking in the down position were enough to convince me.

AnnMarie and I did finally arrive in Atlanta at around 11:30pm. A connecting flight to Newark was still listed on the departures monitor, so we headed to the gate. Unfortunately, the information was old and the plane had already gone. Faced with the choice of spending the night in Atlanta or trying to fly into JFK, we eventually resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd be staying in Atlanta since neither of our car services could pick us up at 2am when the JFK flight would arrive. Instead of the first flight out the next morning (6:30am), we opted for a later flight at 9:30am so we could at least get some sleep. The next task was to find the hotel shuttle for the Days Inn that Delta had provided a discount voucher for.

Heading outside to ground transportation was an exercise in wet futility. The wind-driven rain seemed to be relentless, at times seeming to fall horizontally. After waiting 30 minutes for the shuttle to the Days Inn, we were happy to be in a dry van. The drive to the hotel was about 10 minutes. But there were two problems with the hotel. First, it had exterior stairways, meaning that we both got soaked climbing to our second-floor rooms. The second, more serious issue, was that this particular hotel was directly in the flight path of the airport. At 3-minute intervals, the roar of a jet overhead rocked the hotel. My earplugs came in very handy, and I was able to get about 5 hours of sleep.

The following day was uneventful. Our flight from Atlanta to Newark was on time and relatively comfortable. Our car services were smiling cheerfully as we came down the escalator in Newark. While they knew we had an adventure, they had no idea of the extent.

What did I learn from this episode? I actually learned two things:

• Never trust a travel agent who insists that Atlanta is a better place to connect through than an airport in the midwest (Chicago or Cincinnati) that could get snowed in.
• Second, any travel policy that mandates a connection if the price differential is more than $200 is stupid. This incident cost my company more than $2500 between myself and my coworker in lost productivity. All so that we could save the customer (not even our company, since this was a consulting engagement) a few hundred dollars.

Texas 2003 - Part 2: El Paso

An old adage says that when life gives you lemons you should make lemonade. If there is any truth to this saying, I saw a large lemonade stand on a recent flight between Philadelphia and Atlanta.

For those who fly on a regular basis, it becomes easy to take for granted the background activities that make a commercial flight possible. Many of these mundane tasks such as refueling the plane and loading the luggage into the cargo hold are mostly hidden from view. On larger planes such as the Boeing 767 on which I was flying, luggage is typically placed in metal bins before being placed in the cargo hold. These large bins, weighing more than a ton when fully loaded, are moved in and out of the cargo hold using a specialized machine. A cross between a truck, a conveyor belt, and an elevator, this apparatus takes containers at ground level, spins them around, and lifts them into the plane.

Not long after boarding this flight and getting settled in my seat, the pilot announced that the cargo loader had broken when the plane was being unloaded from the last flight. The airline had obtained a loaner from another airline, and the ground crew was in the process of attempting to load our bags onto the plane.

From my window seat towards the rear of the aircraft, I had a bird’s eye view of the cargo loading activity. And, thanks to my unique vantage point, I was able to witness something quite remarkable. The substitute loader was apparently three inches higher than their typical loader, wreaking havoc on the normally smooth process. With unfamiliar equipment that didn’t exactly match the standard configuration, the ground crew improvised. For the first two cargo bins, they used a truck to gently nudge them over the three-inch gap onto the loader. This worked well, but allowed for the possibility of damaging the cargo bins, so they decided to abandon the truck method.

The third bin to be loaded into the plane was a near catastrophe. The gap between the cargo tug and the loader was too wide and the container ended up toppling upside-down. Alone, none of the five ground crew members could have righted the container. However, working together, they were able to wrestle the container upright again and load it into the plane. Precious minutes were ticking by and it was clear that the ground crew didn’t want to repeat the toppling scenario with the fourth and final bin that was still awaiting loading.

After a brief absence, one of the ground crew re-appeared next to the plane holding a piece of a road barricade. At first, I didn’t understand what he was doing – a small piece of lumber certainly wouldn’t support a 2000-pound cargo container. Despite my assumptions, he wasn’t planning to lift the container with the barricade. Instead, he drove the cargo tug’s wheels onto the road barricade, which he had laid on the ground, and gave it the extra three inches of clearance needed to flawlessly move the bin onto the substitute. The result was an unqualified success, and we were finally on our way.

Normally, my layover in Atlanta would have been about an hour. In this case, the ground delay in Philadelphia chipped away at that layover. Even after making up time in the air, my inbound plane pulled into the gate with less than fifteen minutes for me to get to my next plane. Thankfully, my colleague was already aboard that plane and had alerted them to my imminent arrival.

As Murphy's law of travel goes, when you are running short on time, your connection will always be at the opposite end of the terminal. Murphy wasn't taking a break that day. I arrived in the "A" terminal, and literally had to run to the end of terminal "B" to catch the flight. "Are you Scott?" the gate agent asked as I approached the jetway. I was certainly the last person aboard this plane.

I had made it... but what about my luggage? It wasn't long after I settled into my seat that the plane pushed back from the gate. We had pushed most of the way into the tarmac when the plane stopped. A cargo tug pulled alongside the plane and the driver motioned to the ground crew to open the aft cargo door. They tossed in my bag, closed the cargo door, and then we continued pushback. It dawned on me later that the Delta ground crew had done me a huge favor by going the extra mile by ensuring that my bag made it onto that plane. If not, my clothes would have arrived on the next flight -- at 8am the next morning. Note to self: pack at least one pair of socks and clean underwear in your carry-on next time -- just in case!