Long Trip

Melissa is probably just going to laugh and call me “rookie” after reading this…I had to travel for work this week. It was the first time since November. I’ve traveled plenty for work before (not nearly as much as Melissa, but enough that I’m comfortable with it). Problem is, the trip was already scheduled when I got assigned to the project, so I had no say in the dates or travel location. Someone decided that late July is a fabulous time to go to Phoenix. But hey, it’s a dry heat, right? Actually, it wasn’t too bad. Sure we don’t usually get actual temps as high as 104 like it was in Phoenix on Tuesday, but when you have a temp of 98 or 99 and high humidity, the heat index can definitely feel that hot.


For this trip I was doing focus groups in Phoenix and Chicago. The other problem was that Phoenix was on Tuesday and Chicago was on Thursday. What in the world was I supposed to do on Wednesday?? So I talked to my boss, and ultimately decided that since the focus groups were from 11:30am-3:00pm, I’d make both cities into day trips (instead of going straight to Chicago from Phoenix on Wednesday & hanging out there all day). There were morning flights from Atlanta that would get me into each city around 9:30am, which was perfect. The first snag came for Phoenix. I can’t recall what time the earlier flight was, but I would never had made it to the airport on time after finish up the focus groups at 3:00. My next option – the red-eye. 11:50pm. Thankfully the rest of the people I had traveled with (or, met up with, rather), were organizing a dinner out at a nice restaurant in Scottsdale, and they invited me along (had they not invited me, I probably would have invited myself – it’s one thing to kill 2 or 3 hours in an airport, but it’s another thing to kill 7 or 8). The flight was pretty awful. I was SO tired (had been up since 5:30am Atlanta time to make that morning flight), and we didn’t take off until after 3:00am Atlanta time (it was after midnight in Phoenix). I dozed off & on, but woke up when they turned the lights on to serve the snack. Yes, evidently the flight attendants felt that even in the middle of the night people would want their free Coke & Biscoff cookies. I love those cookies, but I just wanted to sleep. But since I was awake at that point, I took the stupid cookies.

We landed around 6:45 the next morning, and I made a beeline for Starbucks – I needed something to keep me awake for the drive home. Unfortunately, I think the drink was half hot water. I junked it before I even got to the parking shuttle. When I got home (around 8:30) I went straight to bed, where I slept until a little after 12:00. I checked work email, did a few things around the house, and then picked the boys up at 4:00 & the 3 of us went to the pool. I enjoyed getting to play with them, and eating our own food, taking a shower, and sleeping in my own bed. Then I had to do it all over again yesterday.

This time it was a 5:15 wake up for the Chicago flight. The flight didn’t leave until about 9:30 and I was getting really worried – if we had left at 10:00 or later, I would have been late for my focus groups. Stupid Chicago airport…But I made it on time, and grabbed a taxi to take me to where the focus groups were. It’s my company’s policy that if AmEx is accepted, you use it when traveling for business. You should never use cash unless the credit card is not accepted. So I asked the taxi driver if I could pay with AmEx. All he had to do was say no, and I would have paid with cash, but he took it and then proceeded to bitch about it for 5 minutes. “It’s a very short trip!” “I lose my minutes!!” Whatever dude. By the time the focus groups were over & I was back to the airport, I was getting kind of delirious from lack of sleep. I found myself being easily amused by the upgrade & standby lists they were displaying at the gate. For those of you not familiar with this, they put people’s names up there, but it’s sort of in “code” – first 3 letters of the last name/first initial. I found several of the names to be kind of funny when presented in that way. For example: SNO/B and DUN/G. People often consider what, if anything, a child’s initials might spell when deciding what to name their baby but people probably never consider the Delta standby list code structure. But my favorite of all was: SHI/T. I just sat there & laughed to myself about poor old SHI/T who had no chance in hell of getting on our flight since he/she was #38 on the standby list. Yeah, lack of sleep…

I had been warned that there was a 99%-100% chance that my flight would not leave Chicago on time. This turned out to be true. Because of the delay, we didn’t land until around 9pm. However, I did have the best seat on the plane. No, I wasn’t upgraded to business class, but I did have a seat in the front row of coach, and because of the way my seat protruded out, I had TONS of legroom to stretch out as far as I wanted. Here’s the view from my seat!

I finally made it home around 10:45. It was a LONG 3 days. Most of the people I traveled with thought I was crazy for doing both cities (especially Phoenix) as day trips. But really the reason I did it was because of Zachary & Liam. They’re still young enough that 3 days is a long time to go without seeing them – especially if it’s for work. And so I made my travel arrangements the way I did so that I could at least get to see them on Wednesday, even if it was just for a little bit.