Road Warrior

I’m back in Madison after a couple of days in New York City.  It was a quick, busy work trip, but I also managed to get some fresh air and enjoy the sights, sounds, and characters that the City has to offer.

A quick recap of my minor travel adventures.

Monday night flight was cancelled which meant coming back to the airport Tuesday AM–wake-up at 3:45am, on the road at 5:00am.  I always say I’m a morning person but even for me a 3:45am wake-up is early.  If I was an anchor on the Today Show, though, I think I’d be able to suck it up and get used to it.

Going through security Tuesday AM, my bag was taken out of the line-up to be re-scanned.  Interesting–Monday PM everything went through OK and I had not even opened my suitcase since I originally packed it.  Apparently my travel-size eye cream was the problem.  Security was also busy explaining to a woman why she was not allowed to bring her container of soup through security.

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I arrived in NYC, no problems with flights, dropped off my luggage, made it to my meetings.  Meetings ran 2 hours long and I needed fresh air after being in a bunker/conference room all afternoon.  Seemed like a good idea at the time to walk from Wall Street to Columbus Circle and then to my hotel.

Google Maps clocked me at 5.9 miles.  Hooray for multi-tasking…commuting, site-seeing, exercising! Workout checked off for the day.

My dinner choice for the evening–Columbus Circle Whole Foods Market.

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The Whole Foods in Madison is probably 1/8 the size of WFM Columbus Circle.  The choices were plenty and I tried a lot of new salads.

During my walk to buy dinner, though, I realized I was out of emergency snacks–apple, almonds, etc–and had to stop and buy a bag of cinnamon almonds from a street vendor.

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Hopefully you’re still reading–I’m saving the best for last.

Thursday  was a 6:30AM 4 mile run with Theodora!  It was really fun to meet her and learn more about her NYC adventures and get to explore a great city running path.

More meetings, site visits, etc.  Now it’s time to fly home.  On the flight from LGA-DET, a couple with a small child sat next to me.  I think the child was about 14-15 months old.  The parents were giving her pieces of chocolate to “calm her down”.  I’m not a parent and I’m not passing judgement here, but it seemed odd to me.

The real kicker was when they pulled out a Ziploc bag of pork, chicken, and chicken wings to eat.  I’m all for bringing your own food on the plane, but this was stinky and greasy.  I digress.

Last flight, DET-MSN.  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re closing the doors and will be pushing away from the gate.”  Great!  I’m ready to get home.  I’ll be landing around 10pm.

Next announcement:  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.  We’ve got a little maintenance issue that we need to take care of before we leave.”  Oh boy.  The gentleman next to me told me a horror story of being stuck on a plane for 6 hours during an ice storm.  I told him if was nice to me I’d share my bag of snacks if we got stuck.

Thankfully it was a quick fix and we were only about 30 minutes late.

And I got home to see these smiling faces and wagging tails.