Arrival in Vegas

OK. So I get on a Northwest flight out of Stewart (Newburgh, NY) Airport yesterday afternoon. It's a small 50 seat jet. I usually take a duffel bag as a carry on, in addition to my briefcase/laptop case. I took a small carry on my wife uses in place of the duffel bag. Well, the flight attendent decides that one or the other has to be gate checked. Wrong. I'm not gate checking a laptop, and my carry on contains my medications. So she tells me to take the laptop out of the briefcase - they'll check the briefcase. Keep in mind, there was plenty of room under the seat for both items. So before take off, she tells me that the laptop can't be held by me or be put into the pouch in the seat in front of me - "put it on the floor". No way. I made her wrap it in several blankets to put uptop - where, incidentally, there was plenty of room and no reason to gate check either of my items. Then, there's a 45 minute delay on the runway.

Get into Detroit with 30 minutes to go before my next flight which, as usual, is on the extreme other side of the airport (layover was supposed to be 90 minutes). Run across the airport to find out the connection is delayed by 90 minutes. Sigh. It was showing as on time on the screens. Now I had time to grab something to eat.

Plane gets into Vegas at 12:45AM NYC time. Get my luggage - the top is wet. The idiots at TSA didn't repack my bag with my shampoo bottle properly - the bottle popped open (it was in a gallon ziplock bag which I know was sealed when I packed the bag!). Get to the hotel and discover that a dress shirt got doused, in addition to a sport coat and my jacket. Spent an hour rinsing the shampoo out of those items. Luckily, the sport coat (which is dry clean only) looked OK this morning. The shirt I wasn't worried about. Got to bed at 3AM NYC time. Note that I normally pass out at home around 10PM....us old farts do that.

So I made a pilgrimage to a Walgreen's up the strip to get shampoo this morning. In the past 15 years, I think there was only one time, last year to be exact, where a simple trip to NAB hasn't become an adventure and oddysey. At least 'Animal House' isn't in the room next to mine like it was a couple of years ago. Hopefully, things will calm down from this point on.

Axia University is this afternoon. Stay tuned.

Tom Ray
Buckley Radio