IND-CVG-FRA, part 1

So the past day and a half have pretty much been a travel festival?starting from 4am (Eastern Standard Time/Central Daylight) until 14:15 German time, I?ve been on the road.

The first bit of road was I-69 from Fort Wayne, Indiana, down to Anderson where I grabbed breakfast and drank about a gallon of coffee. I then chilled at the IUPUI library, wrote a couple blog entries and then went to the airport-where things sort of started going downhill.

I realized that I’d managed to bring my elite status card for 2003, not 2004-combine that with the fact that I wasn’t flying Northwest Airlines in North America for the first time since… well… uh… I don’t know when, I was on edge. Unlike Northwest Airlines, Delta is not that technologically advanced-in fact the technology sucked. Because I was commencing an international journey I couldn’t use an e-ticket machine-instead I had to wait in a line of somewhat epic proportions to be manually checked in. Had I been on Northwest, I would have used an e-ticket machine and been on my way in 5 minutes. At Delta, this took 20ish minutes.

The situation was exacerbated because Sunday was the US Grand Prix Race-a race that many Americans don’t care about, but appears to be a European love-fest. The airport was crawling with race fans-the restaurants, the lines, seating areas, bars, bathrooms-wherever, filled with race fans-many of them heading home to Europe.

I got to my gate with plenty of time to spare-grateful I was flying through Cincinnati and not Atlanta because Atlanta had been stormed in-the 12:30ish flight didn’t leave until after 4pm. However, my luck eroded quickly when my aircraft was caught in a storm in Chicago. Suddenly my two hour layover in Cincinnati looked shorter. Ultimately it was less than 10 minutes.

<will be finished tomorrow-am jetlagged>