Carolina in my mind.

In my mind I'm going to Carolina.
Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine?
Ain’t it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind?
Yes, I'm going to Carolina in my mind.
-- James Taylor (1968)

Raleigh, N. Carolina- Home of the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either...

I'm really suprised that I didn't get a visit from the FBI or at least Homeland Security...
Follow me for a second...

I was working on my equipment for the installation the following day in the RBC Arena. I have a bunch of cables to build, some connections to solder, hardware to secure inside a waterproof housing...basically an electronics-heavy technical buildup of equipment.
And I was doing it in my hotel room. At a hotel very close to the airport.
Do you see where I'm going with this?

So, imagine you are the guy spraying for bugs at the Extended Stay Hotel and you enter a room where a ogre is hunched over a workspace that looks like this:


Bomb making?

The guy walks in, goes to the kitchen area and starts spraying, then looks at the workspace. He stops, looks at the table (smoking soldering iron, test equipment, etc), looks at me, then says "I think I better come back later...."

Putting myself in his shoes, I'd have had to err on the side of safe-not-sorry and dropped a dime to the Feds, and frankly I'm suprised he didn't. I don't think he knew the difference between Cat-5 and a Kit-Kat bar, so the equipment was probably a complete mystery.
I waited for the knock on the door all evening...
"Mr Young, please come with us, we have a few questions..."
But the call never came.

So it begs the question: If someone *was* doing something clandestine, would it get reported?

I was able to dedicate some time to doing my expense report, which was way overdue...
Stuff from Tampa, the NY/Philly Trip, NHL All Star in Dallas, Atlanta, the NBA All Star trip to Vegas... Now Anaheim, and Carolina...
I was severly out-of-pocket. So, I sat at Hooters and spread out all my reciepts and knocked everything into order, then scrambled to find a FedEx-Kinko's and sent the report off to the office.
Then off to the airport.
Getting out of Raleigh Durham became problematical.
There were weather issues in different areas of the country, and delays in Detroit became missed flights in Newark because the crew coming from Detroit wasn't there.
The backlog of flights in Newark bacame delayed flights in Raleigh because if there isn't a gate for the plane to go to in Newark, the Air Traffic Control center won't let the plane leave it's originating airport.

Screwed up, eh?

Oh well... We boarded the plane at 3 something and pushed back from the gate, then the pilot abruptly shut down the engines and explained the weather-delay-missing-crew-ground-halt nightmare in Newark...
I was only passing through Newark as a connection to Pittsburgh...I started to have bad feelings about the flight...
We waited on the ground for 4 and a half hours- Just when the pilot got fed up with the ATC boolsheet he was getting and took us back to the gate, they lifted the ground halt in Newark... At this point, we needed to be refueled...
And we missed our secondary window.

Needless to say, I missed my connector to Pittsburgh...

At midnight, at the Customer Service Desk in Newark I lost every bit of my charm and Made A Scene.
I think the poor girl behind the desk was seriously fearing for her life...

"... and I could give a fat rat's ass if the Air Traffic hold for Newark is the fault of Continental Airlines or even it it was your fault in particular... I was on the plane, it didn't get here in time. You will get me a hotel room, and you will schedule me on the next flight out to Pittsburgh or we are going to call you boss and wake him or her up and we'll find out exactly who has to get fired and who merely gets demoted to baggage monkey."
I walked away with 3 vouchers... $12 in food, a Hotel Room, and a flight coupon for the 6:30 AM flight to Pisstburgh.

I took the shuttle bus for the oh-so-luxurious Howard Johnson's at EWR and got my room in record time and was snoozing by 1:00 am.

The down side of the delay was that my clothes were still in a holding pattern in the Newark airport... That means I get to wear the same smelly clothes I had on the day before for my flight.
Maybe I can check in early and change clothes once I get to Pittsburgh.

Well... I got back to EWR at just before 5:00AM, checked in for my flight and napped for a moment or three... The flight was a little Embraer 145... The cigar-tube with wings.
It was relatively full, lucky me... No bulkhead seat. :(
But, (you know me, always looking for that silver lining) we got to PIT with no real issues, thankfully.

TBG out-