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Leg #1: Phoenix >> Chicago >> Pittsburgh >> Steubenville>
Leg #2: Steubenville >> Pittsburgh >> Charlotte >> Phoenix >> San Diego
Leg #3: San Diego >> almost Huntsville then Knoxville >> Atlanta >> TigerLeg #4: Tiger >> Atlanta >> Fort Meyers >> Ave Maria
Leg #5: Ave Maria >> Fort Meyers >> Atlanta, Atlanta, Atlanta >> Phoenix

Lessons of Love, by Way of Economics

First, the good news. I bought the New York Times in the airport and found a great article by Ben Stein: Lessons of Love, by Way of Economics. You should read the whole article, but here are my favorite excerpts:

In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship. If you invest caring, patience and unselfishness, you get those things back. (This assumes, of course, that you are having a relationship with someone who loves you, and not a one-sided love affair with someone who isn’t interested.)

Long-term investment pays off. The impatient day player will fare poorly without inside information or market-controlling power. He or she will have a few good days but years of agony in the world of love. To coin a phrase: Fall in love in haste, repent at leisure.

The Revolt at Terminal B -or- Delta Sucks

I had a two-hour layover in Atlanta on my way to Phoenix. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30 PM, and since the thunderstorms had long since blown over, I was confident we would leave on time. I had no idea how many things would go wrong over the next 24 hours.

Since reading about boring travel drama is, well, boring, I’ll get to the point: they delayed our flight every half hour until we were finally able to board four hours later. I was snuggled into my seat preparing to sleep on the long flight to the west coast when the captain came on the speaker: “I’m sorry folks. This flight has been canceled. We’ve tried hard to get a flight attendant, but we are one short and we can’t make the flight. But there will be a gate agent waiting for you outside to help you rebook your ticket.” All 150 people stomped out of the plane and reluctantly formed a line. It was already 11:00 pm.

I got on the phone and called Delta because I figured it would be quicker. After a quick conversation with the man on the phone, he put me on hold. An hour and nineteen minutes later, I hung up the phone because my face was getting hot and I was losing my mind. During that time, only three people had actually gone up to the counter and walked away with a ticket. That’s 30 minutes per person. At that rate, it would take 75 hours to rebook everyone in line. That is almost three days.

Things got more miserable when I learned from the three people who actually got their ticket that they would not leave Atlanta until after 3pm the next day and that Delta couldn’t find any more hotel rooms. (Are you serious? They could only find three hotel rooms in the city of Atlanta?) Lets say we got lucky and were magically issued tickets for the next day. What were we supposed to do for the next 15 hours?

Even with this bad news, I felt fortunate because from what I could see, our line was the shortest line in the whole terminal. There were at least 300 people in the line three gates down. The place was starting to look more like a refugee camp. People were getting angry, yelling and slamming their fists on the counter. Throwin stuff.

At this point I realized something had to change. These things turn nasty real fast. I cornered a Delta employee and tried to explain the situation:

“I understand it’s been a difficult weekend for you all. The thunderstorms have caused a lot of difficulties that are beyond your control. I have no doubt that everyone here is working hard. But I don’t think your supervisors understand how bad the situation has become. We’ve been told there are no hotel rooms and no cars to rent. But there are elderly people here and mothers with small babies. None of us are able to get our luggage. All the restaurants and stores are closed and there is nothing to eat. I think if your supervisors understood how hostile it’s become here, they would send more employees to help.”

She gave me a blank stare and then barked at me: “Look around, you’re not the only one who’s upset.” Apparently something was lost in translation. I tried with two more employees. Nothing.

I called Stephen and told him there was about to be a riot if something didn’t change. I told him to call the local news and explain our story. He called three stations, and each said they already had people at the airport. I’m sure if I walked past security and to the front of the airport, I would’ve been on the news to explain the chaos on the other side. But selfishly, I wanted to get my ticket and get back to Candyce.

I ditched my place in the front half of the line after I got word that another line was moving faster on the far end of the airport. Really, what did I have to lose? There was no way I’d get a ticket if I stayed there.

Indeed, the other line was moving faster. I was the last person in my line to get a confirmed seat on a flight the next day at 6:30 PM, for a grand 24-hour delay. My celebration was short lived because once I had a boarding pass in my hand, they closed all lines and the employees went home.

There were no airline officials left in the terminal except two police officers sent in to keep order. Six hours before, we were dignified business travelers. Now we were treated like hoodlums. It was humiliating.

Survivorman

I rode the escalator down to the airport train with hopes of finding a less populous terminal to sleep in. I was too tired to walk. I just stood there, slowly descending down the stainless steel tunnel. Once at the bottom, I was alone at the airport train station. On the airport speakers played “Take My Breath Away” from the movie Top Gun. The train never came. I walked to Terminal C.

It’s important in situations like that to keep things normal. Try to make yourself at home. I walked into the bathroom to wash my face and wipe down my teeth with a paper towel. I looked at my face in the mirror and noticed the man next to me with a disgusting wound on his forearm. He dipped his soiled bandages into soapy water, then ringing it out as well as he could with the injury. My heart broke for this guy. “It looks like you’ve had a bad day. Can I help you with that?”

He explained that he was a welder by profession, and he had a chunk of metal removed from his arm earlier that day. His clean bandages and medicine were in his luggage which was nowhere to be found. He figured he would be just fine. He thanked me for the concern and he told me goodnight.

If you watch Survivorman, you know that it is impossible to sleep in the wilderness if you do not feel secure. It’s easier to sleep at the base of a tree than it is to sleep twenty feet away because your back is protected. After trying to sleep on a couple benches, I applied my survival knowledge and snuggled into a corner next to a the ticket counter. I was out in five minutes.

I woke up twice in the morning. The morning sun burned through the windows and lit up silhouettes of busy travelers walking confidently to catch flights. These were obviously new people. Each time I looked around and found new people asleep on the benches around me. My back hurt.

Into the City

I got up at 8 am road Marta into the city. I was starting to get depressed in the cage of the airport. Stephen picked me up at the station and few minutes later we were having breakfast at the Riah’s Bluebird, a cozy cafe off of Memorial Drive. I figured it was a new day and I needed to be alert, so I chugged a few cups of coffee after breakfast while we talked about the night before.

What I came to is this: that was just a really poorly managed situation. These are the kind of situations an airline is supposed to anticipate in advance so that when they come, you don’t enrage your customers by stealing away their dignity. I imagine that our story will get to a senior at the airline and many people will be fired. What bothers me most is that the solution was not far away. Delta is one of the largest employers in the city of Atlanta; it would not have been hard to call a couple dozen employees at 9PM the night before when it became clear that the situation was already out of control. But they didn’t, and because of that, there was chaos.

I was done complaining and asked Stephen to drive me around East Atlanta and Cabbagetown and show me what was new. I am in awe of how much those parts of town have cleaned up in the past ten years.

Back in 1998, I was a design intern at a web agency in a cool loft in between Little Five Points and Virginia Highlands. We were all hipsters who wanted to know about the next big thing online and around the city. I’ll never forget the day that James suggested we check out East Atlanta. (Isn’t that where people die?)

That night we went to an awesome pasta place and had a great time. We didn’t talk about it the next day. We never went back. None of us wanted to admit we were afraid of the hipster frontier.

Here we are, ten years later, and it’s become a great place to live, work, and play. Just look at the development called Glenwood Park just south of I-20:

Back in Phoenix

I got back into town yesterday. I was lucky to get on that flight because they put me on a plane that was supposed to take of today. (That would make a 48-hour delay with no hotel, no food voucher, no rental car.) I pleaded with the guy at the counter and he worked something out for me. Now I am back in my beautiful home with my beautiful wife. Soon we will have a baby. I’m probably not going to get on an airplane for the rest of this year.

Leg #1: Phoenix >> Chicago >> Pittsburgh >> Steubenville>
Leg #2: Steubenville >> Pittsburgh >> Charlotte >> Phoenix >> San Diego
Leg #3: San Diego >> almost Huntsville then Knoxville >> Atlanta >> Tiger
Leg #4: Tiger >> Atlanta >> Fort Meyers >> Ave Maria
Leg #5: Ave Maria >> Fort Meyers >> Atlanta, Atlanta, Atlanta >> Phoenix

I am here in Ave Maria, a new civilization near Naples, Florida. I’m fascinated with this corner of the earth. I guy makes a gazillion off of selling pizza his whole life, then sells his Dominos empire and decides to build a college town, complete with a campus, residential, and commercial. But wait, there’s more! He built a cathedral too.

I’m sitting in a grad student townhome on the edge of a wildlife preserve. I know there are gators and swampthings in that water, so I’m content admiring it from the comforts of my shelter. Speaking of gators, my friend who picked me up at the airport explained that she ran over a 10-foot gator on her drive out of campus earlier this year. She said it felt and sounded like she hit a speed bump at 55 mph.

Last night my mom and sisters held a baby shower for Candyce in Atlanta. It was a lot of fun spending time with friends and family like that. I finished the night by throwing my nieces and nephews into a pile of pillows and couch cushions for over an hour. It’s wild to think that I’m going to have a baby girl soon.

I was in the mud pit at Covecrest yesterday afternoon, and it’s had a grave impact on my aesthetic appeal. I can’t remember the last time I had dirty toenails like this. And my face? I have broken out like a high school freshman drowning in stress and hormones. I didn’t know that a 29.5 year old could get zits like this.

Here are some photos of our trip down the Chattooga river. I marked myself with a orange arrow. Now watch me roll out of the boat…

Note: July 22, 2008. I received an email from Jay, the kid who I knocked out of the boat in the above photos. His group left camp early to get down to Florida in time for the Blue Angels airshow. He had a frightening experience:

I was in a 31 foot fishing boat with little cover. We are sitting out in the middle of a big bay when a HUGE black cloud comes out of nowhere, 15 minutes from when the airshow is about to start. That started probably the scariest 3 hours of my life. 10 people were taken to the hospital. 4 from lightning. 6 from other injuries. No direct strikes but people were shocked by touching something metal. The lightning was less then 2 miles away from our boat and there were 5 other people on it. I would guess I said about 100 our fathers and 100 Hail Mary’s. I prayed just about the whole time, while all the college kids around us were in the water, funneling beer. It rained pins and needles on our back for 2 and a half hours straight with no let up. It was terrible. But we made it out ok.

Leg #1: Phoenix >> Chicago >> Pittsburgh >> Steubenville>
Leg #2: Steubenville >> Pittsburgh >> Charlotte >> Phoenix >> San Diego
Leg #3: San Diego >> almost Huntsville then Knoxville >> Atlanta >> Tiger
Leg #4: Tiger >> Atlanta >> Fort Meyers >> Ave Maria
Leg #5: Ave Maria >> Fort Meyers >> Atlanta, Atlanta, Atlanta >> Phoenix

I am so happy to finally be at Covecrest. It has been a very long and frustrating day of traveling.

To start things off, Candyce and I barely made it on our flight this morning in San Diego. I’ve never seen an airport that crowded at five in the morning. We circled Atlanta for about an hour before our captain announced that there were severe thunderstorms over the Atlanta airport and we needed to fly to Huntsville, Alabama, to refuel.

Before we got to Huntsville, the airport had filled up with diverted planes, so we headed north to Knoxville, Tennessee. We then sat in the plane on the tarmac for another two hours before we were able to get back in the air and get to Atlanta. Once we got there, we had to wait another half hour before we could get out of the plane. Our quick 3 1/2-hour cross-continent flight turned into a 7-hr escapade around the South.

Our two-hour drive from the airport to camp was beautiful. I love it up here. It’s good to see lightning bugs again. I am looking forward to the campers arriving tomorrow. It’s going to be an exciting week.

Leg #1: Phoenix >> Chicago >> Pittsburgh >> Steubenville>
Leg #2: Steubenville >> Pittsburgh >> Charlotte >> Phoenix >> San Diego
Leg #3: San Diego >> almost Huntsville then Knoxville >> Atlanta >> Tiger
Leg #4: Tiger >> Atlanta >> Fort Meyers >> Ave Maria
Leg #5: Ave Maria >> Fort Meyers >> Atlanta, Atlanta, Atlanta >> Phoenix

After a long weekend in Steubenville, I was eager to get to San Diego to begin my summer vacation with Candyce. I was tempted to purchase a direct flight from Pittsburgh to San Diego, but $520 is a lot of money. So instead I flew to Charlotte and then to Phoenix. I got really lucky with a delayed Southwest Airlines flight from Phoenix to San Diego. This gave me enough time to sprint down to the US Airways baggage claim on the first floor and then haul it up to the second floor and check it with Southwest. The guy behind the counter said that it would be close and that I should make it quick.

He handed me my boarding pass and I sprinted back up to the third floor, through security, and finally onto my plane before the closed the door. If there ever were such a thing as the Airport Olympic Games, this would be one of the competitions.

An hour and a half later, I kissed Candyce in the driveway in Carlsbad. I had touched five cities in 16 hours.

I spent most of this week designing and then building a window seat for Carolyn’s bedroom. Carolyn (11) and Little Matt (13) helped me measure and make cuts. Jeff’s daughter Miah (4) sanded rough edges and helped me hold boards. The project lasted three days and I enjoyed every minute of it. We’ve already planned bigger carpentry projects for my next trip out.

Jeff’s kitchen is finishing off nicely. The photo of the island below gives you a good idea of what the whole kitchen looks like. The wood cabinets started as an unexciting honey brown color. The counter tops were high-gloss black granite tile. The first thing we did was added the baseboard and “feet” to the island. Then it was primed and painted gray. To finish things off, soap stone counter tops replaced the granite tile.

The Look: Understated Beach House

While we were out for coffee one morning, we found this sign pinned to a light pole. Don’t miss the comments at the bottom…

“Homer” Probably doesn’t know his name.

Leg #1: Phoenix >> Chicago >> Pittsburgh >> Steubenville
Leg #2: Steubenville >> Pittsburgh >> Charlotte >> Phoenix >> San Diego
Leg #3: San Diego >> almost Huntsville then Knoxville >> Atlanta >> Tiger
Leg #4: Tiger >> Atlanta >> Fort Meyers >> Ave Maria
Leg #5: Ave Maria >> Fort Meyers >> Atlanta, Atlanta, Atlanta >> Phoenix

People watching at Chicago O’Hare Airport

Getting up at 4am is not fun. The body is confused by three competing sensations: exhaustion, adrenaline, and anxiety. But somehow it’s a beautiful moment when you realize somebody loves you enough to wake up with you and drive you to the airport. I kissed Candyce goodbye at the curb. Two hours later, I was asleep on the plane to Chicago.

What do you do with four hours to kill in Chicago? People watch. Unlike like your local mall, you can gaze upon the hordes at the airport without feeling like a creep. While observing the foot-traffic patterns for a couple hours, I’ve developed two rules worth making into laws:

1. Walk fast or get out of the way. You may have some time to kill waiting for your flight, but most people do not. Nine out of ten people in an airport are zooming through the airport so they can catch a close flight. And that flight means a lot: there are loved ones and big business deals waiting at their final destinations. So save your leisurely stroll for your neighborhood sidewalks! If you are a chaperon of a group on a summer trip and you have to stop and regather, do it away from the lanes of hurried travelers. This common sense understanding of the reality of airport will save you from getting yelled at or punched in the face.
2. Do not walk and eat at the same time. This is not as civic-minded as the first rule; I just don’t like watching people who do this. Let’s break this down. If you are in a hurry and you are walking, you have an air of importance because you are alert and on a mission. I’m okay with this. Eating is an occasion for romance and friendship, and an opportunity to delight in a chef’s handiwork. I’m okay with this too. But when you try to walk and eat at the same time, you look unsophisticated and confused by surroundings. This can all be avoided if you get it to go and eat it on the airplane. (Exception to this rule: walking and eating Mentos.)

Buy Upright Roller Luggage with Caution

I think we all have to do our part to add dignity and finesse to the thoroughfares of the modern world. What would we do without young people with scarves zipping around our city streets on Vespa scooters? You all make me smile! My wife likes seeing guys carry bouquets of flowers up staircases because she knows love is in the air. Think about it, every neighborhood coffee shop needs at least one old guy wearing a barrette, and everyone feels safe and happy when cute young moms push baby strollers through neighborhood sidewalks.

This brings me to a modern atrocity known as “upright roller luggage.” But first, let’s review where we’ve been:

1. Grab life buy the handle. You can watch old black and white movies and admire men with hats and suit jackets carrying their luggage by the handle, the same way you’d carry a toolbox or a briefcase. You looked ambitious and ready for new opportunities. The film Catch Me if You Can would not have been the same without several scenes accessorized by handled suitcases.

Leo never looked so good.

As an added bonus, a handled suitcase can be used as a weapon.

2. Luggage on a leash. Using forensic evidence I’ve found at thrift stores from my childhood, somewhere in the 1960s, people’s arms got tired and they invented the first wheeled suitcase. These were hard-shell vinyl suitcases in dazzling colors like harvest gold, avocado green, orange, and occasionally turquoise.

If you are 25 or younger, you’ve probably never seen one of these. Here’s kinda how it worked…imagine lowering your hand-held suitcase onto four wheels and then fastening a short leash to the top front corner. Now drag it behind you like a stiff, reluctant dog. This invention was hardly an accomplishment: it was top heavy and prone to flipping and knocking over children when you made tight turns. Not even lusty retro lovers will buy one of these monstrosities at a yard sale. These are all decaying in American landfills next to first-run lava lamps.

3. Modern pull-behind luggage. This is the most functional type of travel bag you can find. It’s agile and rarely tips over. As an added bonus, you can stuff the bottom of a Starbucks coffee cup in the spot where the collapsed handle fits. And if you are trying to look cool, you will be happy to know that pull behind luggage adds to your swagger in the same way as carrying an umbrella ads to your peppiness. As an added bonus, the durable wheels inherited from Rollerblades glide across the floor with a rhythmic pulse. Humanity wins!

4. Upright rollers. It’s basically a looks just like the modern pull-behind luggage, except it rolls beside you on four wheels. The telescoping handle is used to steer the thing as you go. (Stay tuned for a diagram.)

The problem here is that you just can’t look cool with one of these things. You are as cartoonish as a sprinter running with his hands in his pockets. Or like you are dragging a really heavy purse on the ground next to you. I haven’t seen one tip over yet, but it looks built-to-spill like a waitress who balances a coffee pot on her head. I’m getting mad just writing about it, so I’ll stop here.

Franciscan University of Steubenville Welcomes Matt Smith

I haven’t been on the campus of Franciscan since the summer of 2003. I was happy to see that the dorms have been re-built to look more residential and less institutional (peaked roofs vs. brick boxes.) I enjoyed speaking at the conference and visiting with the students. The coffee shop at the center of campus made for a fun common grounds while the thunderstorms swirled through Ohio.

At the end of the day, I decompressed at the hotel watching jazz ensembles from the 1960s on PBS and Hip Hop v. America: Where Did the Love Go? on BET.