Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I'm home safe.

I got back to my house about 10 PM last night, which was a lot sooner than I'd feared, at one point. I forgot that storms on the East Coast mean that planes coming from there don't arrive on time to take on new passengers for other destinations.

After getting to the San Francisco airport extra early (about 8 AM local, Pacific time), to make sure I wasn't late for my 11:50 AM flight due to unforeseen traffic accidents or delays at security check-in (though I did get patted down for the first time in my life, since my watch and my belt buckle apparently set off some silent alarm), my flight from SF to Dallas/Ft. Worth ended up leaving about 90 minutes late, so we arrived in Dallas twenty minutes after my original connecting flight to Nashville was scheduled to depart.

However, when I checked the departures list I saw that the later flight I'd changed to was slated to leave at 9:10 Central time now, instead of 8:05, and that my original flight had also been delayed by bad weather on the East Coast and was only now getting close to boarding time. Taking the chance (even though the irritable American Airlines rep who'd changed my connecting flight reservation in San Francisco that morning had warned me that I wouldn't be able to get on the earlier plane, even if by some miracle I got there in time, once my new boarding pass was issued), I went to that gate instead of my assigned gate and asked the nice guys at the desk if I could possibly get transferred back to this flight. They cheerfully and graciously obliged, and even gave me a better seat than the one I'd booked in the first place (bulkhead window seat with all that extra leg room), so I wound up at the Nashville airport just a little more than an hour after I'd originally been scheduled to land.

My sincere thanks to jwaneeta, keswindhover, missmurchison, and their friend (whose LJ monicker I don't yet know) for allowing me to join their trip.

I just realized that this was the first time I'd ever seen the Pacific ocean (other than from an airplane window), since my only previous visit to the West Coast had been confined to the inside of convention hotels in downtown San Francisco when I attended the AAR/SBL annual meeting there in 1997. This break was something I very much needed, and if I'm better able to handle all the cares waiting for me at home and at work, it's because of the good company and wonderful experiences we shared.