Monday - Travel day

Trains Planes and Automobiles

From home at 9:00 this AM with a fabulous send off from my girls and Sam. Got to O'Hare is record time. No trouble getting to the gate - I checked my bag a curbside spending the $2 to not wait in the long cattle lines inside. Boom, done.

Flight was jammed but uneventful. I am always at the back of the plane - row 27. There was a family of clearly homeschooled kids traveling with mom and dad to Boston. They were being quizzed about how many syllables in the word gum - had to give the right answer in a polite way or not get a piece of gum for take off and landing. The woman next to me was reading a well thumbed copy of the King James Bible. I read a Harlequin.

Easy to get my bag and get to the T shuttle. Transferring to the blue line and then the green line at Govt Center was easy - but the Riverside train is running shuttles from Reservoir (by my old apt at Cleveland Circle)to Riverside - this adds some time and extra level of complication to just jumping on the train and heading into town. The bonus of this little bus cruise was that I got to see the towns I usually trained right by. Blue hydrangeas are very pretty - I'm so used to only seeing pink and green ones that blue ones seem so unusual. I know it's the acidic soil, but they are still pretty. They remind me of Ann Murphy's house in Falmouth.

I had dinner here at the hotel after a good walk provided nothing more than a quick-mart and a place to rent kayaks and canoes. No food.

The big excitement was the fire alarm that went off as I was talking to Sam on the phone. Two fire trucks, a police car, and a command vehicle appeared, but we were only out of the building for 10 - 15 minutes and no one looked too hurried.

It's now 8:00 pm and I have to be ready to leave for the MIT session at 7:15. I was hoping to get Cathy's Dave to drive me to a CVS. Met some folks from Portland. Long day for them, and a short night if they too have to be up early. Even 12:00 here is 9:00 am in Portland.