Slept well, and woke up at a sensible time. Well, sensible enough; There was sunshine & the hotel restaurant had coffee.
( there was an actual ‘Mr Coffee’ coffeemaker in the room, and I discovered why you don’t put too much water in the reservoir of those things. fortunately it was in a little tray, so the overflow of weak coffee was contained )
I’m not 100% sure that I understood the AC controller, but it produced a blast of cold air aimed straight at me while I slept, so that’s good enough. Plus it provided some nice white noise to go to sleep to.
And I slept as much as I could.
I’d thought about going for a walk after breakfast, but investigation showed a distinct lack of footpaths, and I was not in a “walking along the road” sort of mood.
American Airlines does a thing where you pay for checked luggage at check-in, so I did said check-in before I got out of bed, which I feel is peak travelling. At the airport, it was relatively smooth sailing; Kiosk machine to print out my bag tag, a longer line to drop off the bag in question, and even the security line wasn’t too long; They did open a second scanning line, but with an older scanner, so all electronics needed to be removed. Wasn’t too bad for me because I’d put everything in easy to reach places, but the guy with the CPAP machine had a tricky time getting it out of his bag without taking everything else out as well.
One guy had about ten minutes before his flight, and people did let him jump ahead in the queue. Despite this, I saw him leaving the area well after I did & go running off through the terminal, so I have no idea what went wrong there.
I got through security a good few hours before my flight, because I headed for the airport just after checkout ( much easier to find the shuttle when you’re at the hotel, and everyone was flying on the American Airlines, unsurprisingly including the two American Airlines staff ), but that’s no bad thing. Terminal 3 is huge, so it’s got a wide variety of food places/shops, and it was easy to find a mostly vacant gate to sit & hang out in.
The flight was a little delayed, but … It’s not clear why. An aircraft maintenance person came on board, got all the people on one side of a row to get out of their seats, fossicked around a bit, then let them back & did the same thing with the next row back. Presumably he found the whatever it was he was looking for, because we got under way after that.
Uneventful flight, and I did see downtown Indianapolis; The JW Marriott & LucasOil Stadium stand out from the air. I’m told that a bunch of flights arrived at the same time, possibly because a bunch of airline systems went down, so while the baggage claim wasn’t too bad, the pickup area absolutely was. Two lanes of (slow) moving traffic, two lanes of people pulling in, loading bags, and pulling out again.
My tactic of wearing a bright orange Kingsday hat probably helped Tom find me, but it was a tad chaotic in there.
The day ended out at Naomi+Jay’s place, where they are very kindly letting me stay in their guest room for the days before the trip to Columbus for Origins.
Jetlag isn’t bad, but it’s absolutely messing with my “are you hungry” sense. That’s probably not a bad thing.
Leave a Reply