Leave all your money here, please. All of it

LAS VEGAS -- What's the first thing you see when you emerge from that jetway into McCarran International Airport?

Slot machines. Of course.

Now I don't mean like, "Well, it wasn't exactly the first thing I saw -- that was the gate agent's butt -- but it was the first thing I actually noticed." The First Thing I Saw was the slot machines.

And not just one or two, like you see with those video poker machines in convenience stores in Louisiana. Hundreds of slot machines, right there at the gate. Come on, man. Leave some of your money here. What comes to Vegas stays in Vegas, if it came here in your wallet.

(And, I'm guessing, that voice might be exactly why Otis stopped carrying a wallet.)

Anyway ...

I walked. After all, it's just an airport, just like the 60 or so other airports I've trudged through in the last four years, right?

So I trudged. Down in baggage claim, billboards. Huge billboards. Come on, man. Come see our show. Penn & Teller, man; who can resist Penn & Teller? Tickets start at $74.95. Toni Braxton, Rita Rudner, Celine freakin' Dion ... and aren't Celine Dion and Toni Braxton a little young to already be sentenced to Vegas? I thought that's where obsolete performers went to die. I'm certainly not arguing Toni Braxton's obsolescence, but I thought there was an age minimum.

I'm here for business. Have a meeting tomorrow, home Friday morning. I'm not here for fun; I'm not here to drop a huge wad of cash in hopes of becoming really rich. I'm not here to drink myself to death.

I'm staying in a hotel way, way off the Strip. However, as it turns out, if I wanted to have fun, lose a lot of money and look for somebody to be Elisabeth Shue to my Nicolas Cage, I could do so. Right here.

I purposely did very little pre-trip research before this, my first trip to Vegas. So imagine my surprise to discover that my hotel has a casino right here. And a liquor store, right here. Dammit, that voice again: Come on, man; get the fuck off that computer and come downstairs. It's only 11:33 p.m. here, and really, what is time, anyway? Give us some of your money.

Well, my body and my computer think it's 2:34 a.m. I have to be in front of customers tomorrow. I have to be coherent. I have to go to bed.

Tonight, anyway.

Extreme Business Travel

SEATAC, Wash. -- I mentioned earlier that this is my last extended trip for a while. I'm definitely making the most of it.

My day started with work at 7:30 a.m. Pacific time. I left the paper in north-central Washington at 4:30 p.m. for the four-hour drive to Seattle.

That four-hour drive took me along U.S. Highway 2, one of the most stunningly beautiful roads I have ever seen. Ever. And that includes the Pacific Coast Highway. The western slopes of the Cascades on one side and the Wenatchee River flowing on the other, gentle curves and slopes leading me to Seattle. Just fantastic.

Now, for the "extreme" part: I'm waiting for a flight that leaves at 11:45 p.m. PDT. This flight will land in Houston just shy of 6 a.m. Central time. I'll wait there for a couple of hours before boarding a puddle-jumper to my little South Texas destination, which will land about 9 a.m.

The plan goes something like this: Early check-in at hotel, quick shower, shake off the cobwebs and be in front of the customer at 11. On site until 7, grab some dinner (maybe) and a few hours of sleep, and be homebound at 5:20 a.m. CDT Thursday.

The trip to Texas was planned. The trip to north-central Washington wasn't. The Texas trip, however, couldn't be moved. The trip to north-central Washington couldn't be avoided. So here I am. My hotel room tonight is seat 8D of a Boeing 737-800. I'm guessing there'll be no chocolate on the pillow.

Cleared for landing

WENTACHEE, Wash. -- I'm surrounded by some serious natural beauty right now. I'd take a picture, but alas, I forgot to pack a camera.

I'm at the confluence of the Columbia and Wenatchee rivers in North Central Washington State. The Cascade Mountains are off in the distance. It was a 3-hour drive from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to here, along the prettiest Interstate highway that I've ever seen. I'm told the alternate route, along U.S. 2, is even better.

I'll be here until Tuesday, when I will change direction and head down to Corpus Christi, Texas, on my way home to the Western Edge.

The reason this trip is significant is pretty simple: It's the last major trip I'm going to be making for a while. The project in Iowa is winding down. That project is officially the last project to which I'm committed. I will move into my real job full-time: Managing a nine-person team which will do my old job, all around the world.

I'll still be hitting the road occasionally -- I have a couple of one- and two-day trips scheduled for next month -- but the week-long-or-longer trips should be coming to an end. I have two more commitments to the Iowa project, one in October and one in December, but I won't be spinning the numbers on the Marriott points nearly as fast as I have been over the last three years.

I've seen a lot of really wonderful things. Now seems to be as good a time as any for a review, top 3 style:

My favorite places, overall:

Montreal: The best of Europe and North America, all in one place.

Sydney: Getting there isn't half the fun, but it's worth every hour aloft.

Bermuda: Speaks for itself.

My favorite places, domestic (after discovering none of the U.S. stops made the cut):

Bremerton, Wash.: The west shore of Puget Sound provides many options for relaxation. Great people, too.

San Diego: Quite possibly the United States' most perfect city. Ocean on the left, mountains on the right, an international border right there, Los Angeles 100 miles to the north. Oh, and it's 72 degrees every day.

Washington, D.C.: The best place in the world to eat when you're spending someone else's money. Great food and drink from every corner of the world.

Favorite airlines:

Continental: Always clean planes, always good service, and when they're not on time, they tell you why.

Delta: Seriously. Never had a serious problem with them, and I don't find the Atlanta airport to be the hellhole everyone else does.

US Airways: Their lack of competence for handling luggage is offset by the hoops they were willing to jump through to get us to Bermuda. Plus, the Charlotte hub is easy to get around.

Least favorite airlines:

Air Canada: Crowded plane, bad service, connection in Toronto.

Southwest: I love everything about Southwest Airlines, except actually using its product.

United: Doesn't extend Star Alliance benefits to non-United Star Alliance customers. Screw them.

Favorite airports:

Montreal: For all it's trying to do -- Customs, security, getting planes out on time even in awful weather -- it does it very well, in two languages.

Bermuda: Can't forget the island music guy playing in the Customs lobby.

Houston Intercontintental: Good food makes up for long walks between concourses.

Least favorite airports:

Philadelphia: Always steaming hot, lost luggage x 3, rude employees.

Washington Dulles: Grim, dank, dirty.

St. Louis: Dark, rude security, long, long bus ride to rental cars.
(I've never had serious problems at Atlanta, DFW, or O'Hare, which I guess makes me really, really lucky.)

Favorite rental cars:

Ford Mustang: Even the V6 has a wonderful low rumble.

Hyundai Azera: Still the car I probably should have bought.

Pontiac Grand Prix GXP: Supercharged fun, all the bells and whistles; not sure why anybody would choose a BMW 5-series over this.

Least favorite rental cars:

Tie, Chrysler PT Cruiser and Chevrolet HHR: Those cute little retro exteriors hide the two most unintuitive, uncomfortable interiors among any car I've ever driven (including my 1978 Mazda GLC.)Oh, and both are slower than crap, too.

Toyota Camry: A great car for people who don't like to drive.

Pontiac Sunfire: The wrong choice for trying to get around D.C., not that there's a right choice, other than taxi or Metro.

Top 3 things I have learned:

Pack light. Look to reduce weight everywhere. Every ounce counts.

Know who goes where. My knowledge of relationships between airlines and airports has gotten me home when other people took an involuntary overnight. Know when and how to use the airlines' web sites, and if you can't match an airline to its hubs, you're not a Business Traveler.

Being in a hurry really sucks. Do everything you can to avoid it. Being bored once you get past security beats missing your flight, every time.

It's been a helluva ride, it really, really has. I'm now looking forward to getting off. There's an aisle seat available for the next person.

Perhaps Delta should try this

Next time the pilot comes on and says, "Hello again from the cockpit; uhhhhh, we seem to, ummm, have a bit of a, um, mechanical problem and, ummmm, Maintenance tells us they're waiting for a part and, uh, it'll probably be about an, ummmmmm, hour or so," tell them to try this. It seems to work in Nepal.

This week's desktop background

During our trip to Colorado, we rented Jeeps from this fellow in a hotel parking lot in Frisco. His business model is pretty simple: "Here's the keys, here's a map, trust your Jeep, have fun."

The words "Trust your Jeep" rang in my head frequently as I drove my wife and two younger children over small boulders, through creeks, up and down hills on this path that bore some resemblance to a road. We were in low-range 4-wheel drive for nearly 40 miles on the odometer. It was the most fun I've ever had covering 40 miles in 7 hours.

Here's one of the hundreds of fantastic views from that trip. This was at about 13,500 feet, somewhere between Keystone and Breckenridge. To the right you'll see the road we were on; that was the smoothest, safest part of it:



Happy Friday. I'm headed for the mountains, if only in my mind.

Road warrior loses battle

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- I'm sure, after a good week of getting the system ready to unveil for the users after months of work and setup, I'll feel better about things. After a week of clicking here and having good stuff happen up there on the screen, I'll stop bitching.

But until then, if I ever get on an airplane again, it will be too soon.

Wh- wh- wha - ... ?

ERLANGER, Ky. -- I'm not supposed to be waking up in Greater Cincinnati this morning. Yet, somehow, I am. Thanks, Delta.

Update No. 1: Week 2

RALEIGH, N.C. -- I just spent probably two full minutes trying to put a title up there. That's a good sign that you should just hit the tab key and start writing. So I will.

It's been two weeks of bullshit and bliss, two weeks of heart-warming and heart-pounding. Two weeks of wonder and two weeks of fear.

Each week was highly emotionally charged, for completely different reasons. At some point soon, I'll write about each.

I'm going to write about them in reverse, and separately.

The thing which I kind of glossed over earlier for Week 2 was this:

My father was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had surgery Aug. 2.

Right now, all is as well as it can be. The upsides are that he's relatively young (57) and it was found relatively earlier. The downside is that he's profoundly disabled as a result of a 1987 car accident, and that adds a serious level of complication to, well, everything. Oddly, even that has an upside; because of his disability, they were able to remove more of the parts that might be cancerous because they didn't have to worry about his future mobility; to put it simply, they could safely remove more of him and leave more of him disassembled 'cause he wasn't using it anyway. Or something like that.

We await results of testing to determine whether the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. Those results were supposed to be available Monday. We're still waiting.

The rest of the family is waiting back in Anytown; The Wife and our kids wait in Florida, and I wait in North Carolina this week and Iowa next week.

The Wife, the Mini-Humans and I arrived home from Colorado in the single-digit hours of July 31. In the single-digit hours of Aug. 1, we had deposited the kids with a friend and were on another plane to Missouri. I've driven nearly 2,000 miles in the last 20 days, none of which were in my car.

I don't know how everything is going to turn out, but I have no reason to believe it'll be anything other than OK. We're survivors; my dad and his brothers have cheated death in some highly creative and stunning ways, and my dad's parents lived way longer than any actuarial tables would have expected them to. So we wait, and try to keep the worry to a minimum as things move on.

But I can tell you this: I've never wanted to go home more than I do right at this very second. Never.

I'll go back and write that head now, and do Week 1 later. Something tells me I should be sleeping now.

Altitude adjustment

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. -- We're now on Day 4 of our mountain adventure. The Mini-Humans have seen a lot of very cool things for the first time.

We spent the weekend at the home of The Wife's grandmother in Colorado Springs. We spent a fair bit of time driving west on U.S. 24 from there. We saw Cave of the Winds, the Indian Cliff Dwellings, and Manitou Springs, a very well-kept little mountain town with a serious dose of weird. Had some great Mexican food at a place across the street from the hemp shop.

We drove up the mountain Monday to the cabin in which we are staying with 13 of The Wife's relatives. This is an emotionally volatile group, for reasons both valid and otherwise. The occasion is Grandma M's 80th birthday (which is actually in October, but you don't want to be in a cabin in the mountains in October, I'm told.) It's a highly charged atmosphere, and some sparks are flying already.

But when you look past those, you see a group that is deeply devoted to each other underneath some of the stinging insults and thinly veiled judgmentalness (is that a word? It is now). It's an interesting case study into the role of the matriarch, a role which might be dying out with our generation.

Grandma M is probably the biggest influence in my wife's life, and there could be no better role model. She's a woman who carries herself with class and dignity while at the same time also being a helluva lot of fun. She cares about nothing more than the happiness of her family, and in an age where it seems there's suddenly a whole lot of things about which to care, she still keeps her priorities focused. She's a beautiful woman, and it's a beautiful thing to be able to watch her be her first-hand.

It's just before 9 a.m. Tuesday up here in the mountains right now. We're getting ready to gather for a family photograph and then will scatter off to various mountain-y places. I'm going to go take a few (really deep) breaths and continue the acclimation process.

Norteño, sureño

SAN DIEGO -- I slipped away today.

For about 30 minutes, I was completely out of reach of United States authorities. Nobody knew where I was. I had stealthily slipped across the border, and nobody recorded my movements. One minute, I was in the United States; the next, I wasn't.

OK, it wasn't so stealthy. I just walked through a turnstile, and then another, and then I was in Mexico. Apparently, that's all it takes to cross the border in that direction.



I'm a guy who's been held up by zealous Customs agents who thought it was their duty to prevent me from going into Canada. I'm used to having my passport stamped, my picture taken, my iris scanned, everything short of a full body-cavity search.

To get to Mexico, however, all you have to do is pay the guy at the border parking lot $7 to keep an eye on your crappy rental car and walk for about five minutes. One turnstile, two turnstiles, and there you are, in Tijuana.

Frankly, the place kind of freaked me out a bit. I called The Wife as soon as I was across the border. "Don't drink the water, don't drink anything with ice in it, and don't eat anything," she said. "And watch out; the little girls selling beads are actually pickpockets." Just then, a little girl came up to me offering to sell me beads. I politely told her "No," put my hand on my wallet (which I had placed in my front pocket after buying some pesos) and walked on a bit.

In every direction, I saw ... well, I didn't see taco stands; I didn't see souvenir shops; I didn't see restaurants and bars. I saw ... pharmacies. Lots and lots of pharmacies.



This is what Tijuana offers tourists. Not a taste of Mexico, but relief from the fucked-up United States health care system. An opportunity to beat Big Pharma at its own game.

Past the first wave of pharmacies, there was one restaurant, which sported big Corona banners and looked very much like a Mexican restaurant you'd find in St. Petersburg, Fla., or Rockford, Ill. I decided not to walk past the aggressive shopkeepers down to Avenida de la Revolucion. I turned around and headed for the northbound border crossing.

I walked past a long line of folks who I presumed were waiting to cross the border. I kept walking, though, following the gringo family that seemed to know where it was going. After about 150 people, I determined the line was for the U.S. immigration office. This is where people who were not carrying U.S. passports had to wait. I walked past all those people and went on through Customs, where I was subject to the wary eyes of the agents, a scan of my passport, and a muttered admonition to "have a good day."

We're trying so hard to keep those people out. They're trying so hard to get here. Why? It's not because we have more pharmacies. It's because they believe in the promise of a better life in the U.S. And many of them are willing to work their asses off for it.

Take a look the next time you drive past a strawberry patch or a construction site. Listen to the Spanish flowing from the tongues of the workers. Say "hola" to the woman who's cleaning your toilet at the next hotel you stay in. Then, take a look at the guy with the sign standing in the median. Bet he doesn't speak Spanish. Now tell me who has the sense of entitlement.

These people come over, and we give them jobs. We give them jobs because it helps us balance our books better. We give them jobs because, in the words of The (Holy Crap, This Dumbass is the) Leader of the Free World, "they'll do jobs that Americans won't do." You want to prosecute somebody? Don't prosecute the illegal workers; prosecute the companies who hire them illegaly. Yeah, that's gonna happen.

All I needed to go south was to spin two turnstiles. All they need to go north is to stand in line for hours, days, weeks, years, and beg for permission.

As I emerged from the border crossing, safely back on American soil, with my steps having been scanned and noted by the Department of Homeland Security, I crossed the pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5 in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego. The first thing you see at the foot of that bridge? An outlet mall. God bless America.

Don't talk to me, and nobody gets hurt

SAN DIEGO -- I was an asshole this morning. In my defense, it was completely justified.

I have a very well-defined System that takes me from one place to the other with maximum efficiency. It's very important, for a guy like me who goes from one place to the other with great frequency, to have an efficient System. That's how I get from one place to the other without losing things like my passport or my credit cards or my right ear.

Part of the system involves how I carry my bags. I have a basic roll-aboard suitcase, and a backpack that plays the part of "small personal item," despite the fact that it basically has the contents of an Office Depot inside. The backpack is strapped to the suitcase. On cross-country flights, such as the one I was on Monday morning, I strap one of those neck pillows to the suitcase-backpack rig.

So I'm getting ready to board the shuttle that takes me from landside to airside at the Home Airport when a salesman-looking guy spies the rig. You know the Salesman Guy: Tall, in good shape, mid-40s, polo shirt, black Dockers. Being a Salesman Guy, he has a pathological need to make small talk. "So, you got your pillow; you're all ready."

Now, he doesn't know that I'm pathologically opposed to small talk; he doesn't know that before 7 a.m., I can be violently opposed to small talk. I gave it my best, "ha-ha, yeah, I got a long flight."

He doesn't get the message. "So, you got a blanky packed away in there, too?"

I gave him a look of utter contempt, and just barely by the skin of my tongue stopped myself from saying, "Man, shut the fuck up." I proceeded to untie my shoes; this is part of the System, also. I have a hard time finding shoes I like, given that I wear a size 6 1/2, and all the shoes I own have laces.

"Ah, yes, you'll learn someday," he said. "Slip-ons for travel. You don't do this very often." He continued to leer.

By now, I'm openly fuming. He's attacking my Travel Skill. "I travel a lot," I said, through a fake smile, "and I like these shoes." I then gave him the Shut-the-Fuck-Up look again. This time, he did.

I needed THAT start to my day at 7 a.m. when I was faced with sitting in a middle seat from the Western Edge to Phoenix. Fucker.

Later, after some soothing music, I realized the guy is just one of those people who have perpetual diarrhea of the mouth. Well-meaning, but possessed with a belief that people want to hear what they have to say. Poor guy couldn't have been more wrong at that particular moment, but hey, everybody has his weakness.

I tried to get some of the good travel karma back. I managed to get an aisle seat for the second leg of my trip, but gave it up so a woman's 6-year-old daughter could sit next to her. I was also excrcuiatingly nice to the person sitting to my left in the new seat; her headphone thingy wasn't working, so I let her string the headphone wire across me to my seat so she could watch the movie. Having already had my Asshole card punched for the trip, it was the very least I could do.

Somebody else's bad day in the air

I've been in New York's Kennedy Airport once. It was awful. Apparently not as bad for me, though, as for these people. Particularly liked the part about how the guy's wife called Delta to ask about the status of her husband's delayed flight, and Delta said "it took off hours ago," and the wife said, "well, no it didn't, I just talked to my husband," and Delta said, "well, fuck you." Or something like that.

So we've been pretty hard on American Airlines in this forum. Now it's Delta's turn. Who's next?

And it was, indeed, there and back

I find myself taking for granted things like a trip that goes something like this:

Get on the plane

Make your connection

Get off plane

Go to meetings

Get on plane

Make your connection

Get off plane

Drive home.

No delays, no drama, no having to negotiate with gate agents, no running. It seems to happen a lot less these days. Makes for a boring story, but for a much happier me.

There and back

I'm preparing to embark on what essentially is a day trip to the West Coast. Florida to California today; back tomorrow.

Island time

HAMILTON, Bermuda -- It started out as a battle between Good Karma vs. Evil Karma. It turned out to have a happy ending -- a beautiful trip to a beautiful place, a place that defies description. I spent years pooh-poohing The Wife's desire to visit one of the touristy islands. "We live in Florida," I said. "Why would I want to go to an island?"

Bermuda showed me why.

Words won't do it justice. Beautiful cerulean blue water, pink-sand beaches, everything you'd see in a tourist brochure and then some. Imagine a couple in love walking along a peaceful, secluded, empty beach, and you have a good picture of what we were doing last week. And by that point, we wouldn't have been talking about how we almost didn't get there.

The original plan called for us to clear Bermuda customs at about 3:30 p.m. Saturday and have a little better than a day and a half of a weekend before I had to go work at the island's daily paper Monday through Thursday. That plan was scuttled when the plane's weather radar wouldn't function, which was a bad thing on a day when a tropical storm was hanging out off the Florida coast.

Time for Plan B. Between my wife's sweet-talking and my quick work on the airport's wireless connection, US Airways rebooked us on a Delta flight to New York, which connected to the last flight out of the U.S. to the island on American. We had a half-hour to catch the Delta flight and a little better than an hour in New York. No problem.

Oops, one problem. The Delta flight was landing at LaGuardia. The American flight was leaving from JFK.

We were already making our plans to just concede and stay the night in New York when Good Karma shoved it up Evil Karma's ass. We landed a bit early at LGA. The taxi hit little traffic on the 11-mile ride to JFK. We finally convinced the American gate agent that our handwritten permission note from US Airways was indeed legit. We landed in Bermuda -- without luggage, of course, but it would be there the next day, right? -- at little after 7 p.m., a little later than we wanted but still plenty of time to see the sunset during the taxi ride across the island.

Sunday was an absolutely glorious day. We zipped around the island on our rented motor scooter, which should have been pretty easy. I've been riding motorcycles for a good portion of my adult life. Nothing I know about riding an 800-cc motorcycle, however, translates to riding a 50-cc scooter. Especially not on the left side of the road. After some reflection, I have to be honest: Every second on the scooter was pretty damn scary. Point A and Point B, however, were wonderful.

We rode along the shoreline roads, stopping occasionally at big rock bluffs and tiny little beaches. We went to St. George on the island's northeast end, a charming little town with architecture from the 17th century. We ate and drank and ate and drank some more. Oh, and our bags did show up, but on Monday, not Sunday, and not before I had to spend about 2.5 times what I would normally spend for an emergency set of business clothes.

While I fussed with software during the week, The Wife had a spa treatment and a snorkeling trip. She deserved every minute of her leisure. She's been busting her ass without a real vacation for, God, I don't even know how long. It was glorious to see her so relaxed. It was worth every stride through those airports and worth every penny.

Here's the best travel tip I can give you regarding Bermuda: Make the trip on someone else's money. A perfectly ordinary lunch at the Asian deli for myself was $18. Every dinner we had was well into triple digits. I'm pretty sure the Cokes from the mini-bar were $8; I didn't even look. My expense allowance covered most of it, if you have a fairly loose definition of "most."

Thankfully, I'm a rich man. Not because I have a big bank account; far, far from it. What I do have, though, is the memory of kissing a beautiful girl while the Atlantic Ocean crashed into a coral reef behind us and a bright pink sunset above us.

Anybody got a stagecoach?

Bermuda travelogue later. Rant about airlines now.

You could say the American air travel system is broken. That would imply that there is a system at all. Case in point:

As I type this, I'm at the Philadelphia International Airport. The operation here is in complete chaos, owing to an FAA computer failure earlier in the day and storms over the northern Midwest this evening.

My flight was scheduled to depart at 8:30 p.m. from Gate B9. As of 8:15 p.m., that gate's previous flight, to Seattle, had not yet departed. All the gate agent at B9 could tell us is that my flight was not departing at 8:30 p.m. from Gate B9. She couldn't tell us when it was going to depart, or from where; all she could tell us is what wasn't going to happen. That was information we already had.

At about 8:35, the gate agent at B9 announced that our flight would depart from C24. But they didn't tell the agent at C24. We told the agent at C24. The agent at C24, needless to say, was surprised as hell to see us.

So an unhappy gate agent is now facing 200 unhappy people -- not to mention the people who are getting off the plane that just landed, many of whom have missed connections because of all the chaos and confusion.

As of right now, my flight still shows that it's taking off at 8:30 from B9. It's 9:08, and there ain't nobody at B9. A couple of people just ran like hell to B9, only to get redirected here. However, at the U.S. Airways web site, the flight shows it's taking off from C24 at 8:30. That was 38 minutes ago, and we're all still here.

So I ask:

Why wouldn't somebody at B9 call the guy at C24 and warn him we were coming?

Why isn't the information updated in one central place? Great that the usairways.com website was updated; however, that's not very helpful to a bunch of people in an airport who don't have access to a computer. Shouldn't they have updated it on the boards first?

Why, when it becomes apparent that chaos is going to happen -- and if the computers go down, there will be chaos; when there are storms, there will be chaos -- why do airlines wait so long before making adjustments? They've been through this enough already. You'd think there'd be a contingency plan. I'm not saying it would be easy, or readily apparent, but it seems it could be done.

Why the hell is it always so damn hot in the Philadelphia airport? No matter what time of year, this place is always a steambath. At least you can count on something when you're traveling.

And most importantly: Why do airlines not staff at levels appropriate to the demand? It's completely inhuman to make one gate agent face 200 people who want to get on a plane and 200 people who are on their way on the plane. That's 400 vs. 1; even if only 10 percent of those people have questions, that's 40 people.

A system that is built to work only when conditions are ideal is not a system. I guess it doesn't matter, because people won't stop traveling. We get what we pay for.

Edit to all this: We boarded the plane at 9:41 p.m. Because of all the backed-up flights, we took off at 12:02 a.m. We were on the plane on the ground longer than we were on the plane in the air. At least the air conditioning worked.

Working on island time

If I wasn't having so much damn fun, I'd be providing you daily updates from Bermuda. But I am, so I won't. A comprehensive update will follow. Suffice to say:

This place is not for the faint of wallet

Nothing you know about riding a full-size motorcycle will help you ride a 50-cc scooter

I'm married to the most fantastic woman in the world.

More to come.

Next stop: The islands

I'm headed here tomorrow morning. The Wife and I are flying first class, courtesy of all of my customers who have been flying me around the world the last year and a half. I'll be working next week, but will be enjoying beautiful island sun until Monday with the greatest woman in the world. Your envy is merited.

Friendly skies, my ass

Would someone at American Airlines please justify this? A little explanation from somebody would be nice.

I travel a helluva lot, and I've had my share of bad airline experiences (and part of your share, too). But this little string of events is just getting silly. And it's not the fault of the $26,000-a-year employee who megacorporation American Airlines leaves at the gate to face 200 passengers. He or she gets paid and gets to go home that night whether he or she is an asshole or not. Aggrieved passengers say they want some "accountability." Why should the front-line employees be responsible for accountability? They're not going to get treated any better or worse by their employers no matter how professional they are. The best customer servants will likely be rewarded with the opportunity to work more unpaid overtime. The worst will keep their jobs. Doesn't sound like much incentive to me either way.

Disclaimer: I've flown American Airlines twice in my life, both times by accident and neither for a round trip. (On each occasion, I was rebooked on American after the flight I had purchased on another airline was canceled.) I can guarantee you after the situations in Austin and the one described in the link above, I will continue to not voluntarily fly American. Not that my primary airlines are much better. It's rare that I run into a Delta employee who isn't a jerk, and US Airways has mishandled my baggage enough times that I'll now find a way to carry on for a 10-day trip.

So, why? Why do airlines treat their customers like shit? Why do airline employees continue to work for employers who treat them like shit, which they pass on to the customers? Why do airlines allow their employees to treat people like shit? It's a vicious swirling circle.

And, I guess most importantly: Why do I care, as long as I get to Point B safely?

High and dry

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- I'm looking out my hotel window at Corpus Christi Bay. If I had a really powerful telescope, I could look straight across the Gulf of Mexico, through St. Petersburg, Fla., and across Tampa Bay to my house, where apparently a toilet exploded, leaving several inches of water on the floor in the bathroom, bedroom and adjoining areas, and possibly enough water under the floor to necessitate replacing it. All of it.

Meanwhile, The Wife has houseguests of both the human and canine variety. In short, we could not have picked a worse day to schedule a plumbing disaster.