My first blog this week talked about my meandering flight to San Antonio. I mentioned that one flight I passed on would have taken me to Chicago.

 

That seemed a bit odd since Chicago is north of Seymour and San Antonio is south of Seymour.

 

I should have known the flight home was going to be more convoluted when I saw that it was going to be a couple hours longer to arrive in Louisville than it did to get to San Antonio.

 

Yep, the flight home went to Chicago’s Midway Airport. After an hour layover, which became a two-hour layover, a second plane took me to Louisville.

 

I thought about asking the flight attendant if they could toss my bags out and give me a parachute as we flew over the house en route to Louisville, but I learned long ago that flight attendants – like TSA workers – generally don’t have much of a sense of humor, especially at 12:15 on a Friday night.

 

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I mentioned in a blog Monday that I first had good thoughts upon learning my flight out of Louisville was leaving from Gate B17. That’s because it reminded of Pop since he was a ball-turret gunner in Flying Fortresses during World War II.

 

That was tempered when I learned I’d be flying into St. Louis for a brief layover.

 

When traveling to Chicago tonight en route to Louisville, I saw that my plane from Midway to Kentucky would be leaving from, you guessed it, Gate B17.

 

Upon landing and rushing to my gate, I learned that the flight would be about 40 minutes late, now scheduled to leave at 10:15 p.m.

 

Hope we don’t leave any later. It’s already been a long day, and I miss Karen and the girls.

 

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Flights really seem to be booked these days. They also seem pretty convoluted.

 

I’m not sure why, and not real certain I care enough to find out. I’m guessing it’s because of the airlines struggling financially and trying to get the most folks on a plane as possible, even if the flights take you a little out of the way.

 

..

 

Snacks and meals on airlines are pretty paltry these days. My flight from San Antonio to Chicago offered dry roasted peanuts and a bag of Cheese Nips.

 

The peanuts, though few, were good. I put the stinky Cheese Nips in my pocket, not wanting to open and therefore release their gut-wrenching stench. Hannah will likely get them. For some season, she likes them and doesn’t think they stink.

 

..

 

Lots of folks seem to work Sodoku puzzles waiting in airports and flying to their destinations. Same thing with working on laptops.

 

I asked the man in the window seat of my row – no one in the center seat (YEAH) – if he worked the pouzzle in his hometown paper (he was doing the one in USA Today). He does.

 

I also asked him what he liked about his hometown paper, which turned out to be the San Antonio Express. We talked a while about his newspaper reading habits, which he described as strong, and his use of the Internet, which he described as not so strong.

 

These questions folded in well with our editors meeting this week as we continue transforming the newsroom into an information center that serves both print and online readers.

 

Our discussion yielded some interesting observations.

 

It also yielded an answer to the first question posed in this posting. Turns out he’s a pilot for Southwest, en route to Chicago for his three-day shift.

 

The reason my flight was so convoluted? Lots of people fly from Louisville to St. Louis and Chicago, and lots of people fly from San Antonio to Chicago. But few people fly from Louisville to San Antonio and vice versa.

 

So they’re simply sending you to the best place to get you to your destination based on market forces. Nothing wrong with that.

 

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Check-in at the airport this morning, that is getting through the TSA screen, went rather smoothly.

I didn’t get red-lined, pink-lined or yellow-lined as in most trips since the 9-11 terror attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. In the first four or five years afterward, I felt like I was being profiled. That somewhere there were government types that had some kind of secret information that said short, fat, graying white guys would soon launch the next wave of terror against America.

How else could I explain always having my ticket defaced with a marker of one color or another and being waved to the area where belts come off, the pat downs come just shy of asking you to cough and your laptop’s memories are erased.

And of course there were the luggage searches.

You could always tell my stuff had been rummaged through. Sometimes there were even notes indicating that “yes, indeed your things have been rummaged through, and we want to make sure you know it.”

But last year, on a similar business trip to Arizona, that changed.

A fluke, I thought. After all, I am a short, fat, graying white guy who hadn’t lost much weight and who had not — and still have not — turned to Pete Rose’s friend, Grecian Forumla 16.

Could it be that all that red-lining, all those tummy pattings and all those erasing of memoories had thwarted the use of my people as weapons of terror?

I don’t know. I’m betting I’m just on a two-trip lucky streak. And I still have to get home.

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Some observations while flying to San Antonio:

There’s no easy there from Seymour.

And early morning flight out of Louisville took me to St. Louis.

“Don’t get off there,” the Southwest attendant warned during check-in. “It’s just a 20-minute stop. Then you’ll go to Dallas and change planes.”

A similarly early flight out of Indianapolis with another airline would have included a brief stop in Chicago — isn’t that NORTH? — and a change of planes somewhere else.

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When  the Southwest attendant gave me the gate number, B17, I thought it was perhaps a good omen. It reminded me of Pop, who flew as a bellygunner aboard B-17s in the skies over Europe during World War II.

But then the attendant brought up the brief stop in St. Louis.  Not a good thing, since I’ve had nothing but problems when flying in or out of Lambert.

During one approach for a layover, our plane was slowing down, lining up for landing and starting to drop from the sky. Then the jet engines roared. The plane jerked up and to the right.

“Sorry about that,” the pilot or some other crew member said. He then mentioned something about a “near-miss” with a military transport.

A near-miss? I realize the airline industry probably doesn’t like the word “collision,” that’s what “near-miss” means to this English major. Collision. Objects miss each other or they collide. You don’t nearly miss something. You miss it or you don’t.

But there was no such incident today.

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I also noticed while driving to Louisville that truckers on Interstate 65 were going slower than normal, confirming a conversation that two friends shared at church Sunday.

Jerry, who had just returned from a trip to Tennessee, asked Kenny if truckers were driving slower. Kenny said that was case as they try to conserve high-priced diesel fuel and therefore their profits.

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Breakfast offerings at airports are pretty slim, especially in the early morning hours.

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