The flying

...after moving out of my apartment of two-and-a-half years and living on my friend's futon for a week, I stood waiting out on the sidewalk on a cold December morning in Philadelphia. I waited for the airport shuttle I had called an hour earlier. The van, run by Lady Liberty Shuttle (their web site oddly circulates between a picture of Chicago and Cleavland), was running a little late. I was growingly concerned but didn't fret it, at $10 it was much cheaper than a taxi cab and a better option than waking my friend and coercing him to drive or walking a mile and a half to the train station to take something only marginally cheaper than the door-to-terminal service Lady Liberty offers.

Arriving at PHL I managed my 4 large and overstuffed bags sans Sky-Cap. I had so many because, as I mentioned, I moved out of my apartment—an apartment which was super-saturated with stuff. A family member had booked this flight for me and they had booked me with pennypinching zero-frills carrier, Southwest. While I don't really appreciate the complete lack of services offered, I do appreciate their baggage policy of allowing three checked items of up to 50lbs without an additional charge. My backpacking/trekking backpack, in which I intend to take most of my things to Europe, is the 6,000 cu.in. EMS Summit 6000. It had two large blankets strapped to it (one of which I had to move) along with a full-sized crook-handled umbrella and barely passed the 50-lbs weight limit.

PHL is undergoing some terminal expansion. The E-terminal ID-checkers from the TSA were a lively pair, the burly bald man with a handlebar moustache was very excited to find that someone in the line was from Dayton, Ohio, which he claims is a rarity. He stated listing Dayton suburbs that everyone always seems to come from. Then several other people in line claimed they were from Dayton—it was very surreal.

At the gate I learned three things, Southwest seriously overbooks their flights, you have to go to the gate counter to get an actual boarding pass, and that my flight from Philadelphia to Austin is really a flight to Orlando that continues on to Austin and then to San Diego and Oakland (I pity the fool who booked a flight to Oakland from Philadelphia only to find this their route).


I board the plane, a single class 737, and sleep for most of the flight in a window seat. On the flight from Orlando to Austin, I wake up to have some coffee in a Styrofoam cup and some Wheat Thins, Southwest's idea of "lunch" I suppose.