Passing Through

The airport is a very ethereal place to me. The dulced tones of Wolf Blitzer being produced by the droves of flatscreen televisions softly outweighing the murmur of passengers scurrying to their destinations. Really no universally accepted definition of time; only the suggestion of what time zone you are in recognized only for context. This is no more aptly demonstrated than by restaurants accepting our U.S Airways food vouchers for "dinner" at "breakfast" and Spending a lunch voucher on a 16 oz. Sam Adams Summer Ale.

We should be in England.

We gave ourselves several hours to catch our flight from Baltimore to Philadelpia last night, but the plane we were supposed to take was coming from Charlotte and was delayed just enough that we figured hopping a cap to Philly would give us a better chance of making our conecting flight to Manchester. This was probably a good decision as our cab driver never found cruise control below 90 mph and we made a 2:15 drive in about 1:20. But the lines were longer than we bargained for and we found ourselves in a free hotel room at a Ramada Inn with $40 of food vouchers to last us 24 hours.

After a good night's sleep (first one in about two weeks) and having spent the past 6 hours or so in the airport, we've burned through our vouchers (mostly on beer. Can you believe they let you spend food vouchers on beer? I love U.S. Airways) and are waiting for our 1st class flight to Brussels, where we'll hopefully connect without incident to Manchester to spend the week with Vanessa's family.

It's been a colossal pain, but we've had fun as airport denizens AND we have first class seats to Brussels so we can't be too upset. I've really enjoyed our time milling around the airport. It's like a little city populated with temporary citizens. Everyone has a story about where they're going and why they're sitting in a restaurant in Philadelphia rather than hanging out at their final resting place. There's an overwhelming feeling of being snowed in. People that would normally never have occasion to meet one another find themselves showing off pictures of their kids. Some random place in concourse C becomes your local watering hole for an afternoon, and the bartender instantaneously knows exactly how you like your gin and tonic. People sleeping on seats in public and having overly emotional phone calls on a bluetooth because there's no better place to do it.

Those pictures in the previous post? That's me showing Vanessa how a blog post goes from concept to creation after four pints. We're sitting in the Philadelphia Brew Pub, our new local bar. Making it our own. "Who, those people taking pictures," the bartneder answers, "That's Jamo and Vanessa. Heading through to Manchester. Been regulars here for three hours."