Sunday, April 15, 2007

Welcome Home (to Grey)

Welcome Home to Slush


Schenectady, New York

Erin was the first one to leave in the morning. With a giant storm hitting the entire east coast, her car service arrived at 5:30 am to get her to Tampa in time for an 8:30 am flight. Nancy, generously, arouse from bed to spend some time with her, but I stayed in bed, doing nothing more but say goodbye to her when she left. I was up early enough afterwards and began the process of clearing my system of phlegm, showering, and putting the finishing touches on our packing.

A couple of minutes after 8:30 am, we were on our way to the Fort Myers airport (Southwest Florida International). The Mikes followed us into the airport and made sure we were on our way. We bought a few items to entertain ourselves (a New York Times, some drinks), and we stood in line. Our flight was on time leaving for Baltimore and arrived in Baltimore a little early. Along the way, we hit some severe turbulence that shook the plane ferociously. Nancy noted that turbulence jostles the flow of the plane allowing us to feel how fast it was going. Best of all on this flight, a bolt of lighting appeared to hit the plane just outside our window. I saw the flash, and the plane shuddered a bit right at that moment, so I'm pretty sure we were hit. It couldn't have been more than fifteen feet from us.

In Baltimore, we sat down for a reasonable lunch at a Mexican restaurant. We drenched our foot with the mild hot sauce on the table to add more flavor, but the food wasn't too bad and it was fairly cheap. Afterwards, we stood in line again for our last flight. Lots of bad turbulence in this flight too. (Tim and I kept making references to the great film Turbulence: "It's a Category 6 storm." "Is that on a scale of one to six?" "No, that's on a scale of one to ten!") No lightning this time.

We arrived in Albany right on time, but had to wait about twenty minutes until our gate was open for us. (As soon as Nancy saw the weather, she noted she'd rather be in Florida.) It took forever for Southwest to bring us our luggage, and it was soaking wet. After an hour in the airport, we went outside.

The Albany International Airport's Parking Lot

The parking lot was dreary, full of slush, and being pummeled by a soggy sleet. Nancy called the precipitation "slushing."


Tim had the job of cleaning the car of slushy snow as I loaded the car and took a few pictures.




Home was no better. Our front lawn was covered with slush, as was Nancy's car.


Our house looked okay in slush, but it was soggy as well. It's a bit cold here, damp, and uncomfortable--so it's been a hard change on people not used to wearing socks anymore!

We unpacked. Nancy washed the dishes. I began dinner and Nancy finished it as Tim and I picked the three dogs up from the kennel. Strangely, today was the most expensive day of our vacation by far, because we paid for our long-term parking and for kennelling our dogs today.

Today was the official end of our vacation, but tomorrow will bring one last posting to this blog: the traditional listing of the statistics.

volveremos a las tortugas

3 comments:

Brave Astronaut said...

Was the food so bad in BWI that you had to eat you "foot" covered in hot sauce? Welcome home, see you on Thursday.

Erin Mallory said...

Um, the quote from Turbulence was "Is that on a scale of 1-10?" "No. That's on a scale of 1-6." Implying, of course, that the storm was the highest level it could be.

Geofhuth said...

I'm shutting down comments next time, since all the nice comments are sent to me via email and all the copyedits are posted as comments.