Driss-A-Blog

I got there about twenty minutes before the original departure time, and the ticketing machine refused to let me check my luggage. So I started talking to the ticket agent, who informed me that the plane that they were using wouldn’t even be arriving from Newark for another hour.

“So they just fly the Embraer in a circle from here to Newark?”

“Oh, yes!” And she talked about the “RJ” like I was some kind of veteran traveler, and totally missed the fact that my bag was twenty pounds overweight.

During the three hour delay, I ate the snacks my mom packed me and a Baby Ruth bar purchased from the newsstand. I played video games and checked my email.

Finally, I got on board. With 1-2 seating, the Embraer solves the age-old question of “window or aisle?” You can have both. I crammed a bag of CDs that I was carrying home under the seat in front of me, but that left me with a backpack. The overhead bins held nothing larger than a coat, and I was forced to pull both laptops out of the backpack and gate check it. (Two laptops; you don’t want to be behind me in the security line.)

By the time I got home, the combination of the delay, the wobbliness of the airplane, the shaking of the trains, and the inescapable humidity of the air (causing my hair to surrender to some primeval frizziness instinct) took me out for the rest of the day. Fortunately, my day was already over by that point, so it didn’t really matter.