Ryan Morlok’s Blog

If you think the title is long, you should have been on the trip.

I traveled to Miami this last week to attend the ASHA annual convention. Things went well, but it was a lot of traveling. My flight left Chicago at 9:45 a.m., and I wasn’t sure how bad traffic would be getting to O’hare, so I left at 4 a.m. Things went well, but in Atlanta (originally the only stop on my flight) the plane was overbooked, so I said I’d be willing to take a $300 voucher to take a different plane a few hours later. Not a big deal, I wasn’t going to be doing anything in Miami until the following day anyway.
Unfortunately, the plane I was supposed to take from Atlanta to Miami was having mechanical problems, so after about an hour waiting in Atlanta, then sent me off to Dallas to catch a flight to Miami. Thankfully, they were nice enough to bump my voucher to $500. I made $500 on a $160 round-trip flight. Not bad.
The big annoyance came in Dallas, where my flight was running 3 hours late. It was 2:30 a.m. by the time I got to my hotel in Miami.

I attended the ASHA conference the next day, and I that evening I flew out of Miami back to Chicago (nonstop). My hotel didn’t have an airport shuttle, so rather than spend more money on a taxi fare ($37+tip) I decided to take the city buses to the airport. I had plenty of time, but it took me an hour where the taxi would have been 15 minutes. At least I saved $35.50+tip.

The flight from Miami to Chicago was uneventful, and from there I headed to South Bend to meet up with my family. We watched a Notre Dame game the following day, and Sunday afternoon I drove home. It was a long traveling stretch. I changed timezones 6 times (if you count all the airport hopping I did). My traveling stretch continues, as I’m currently in a hotel in Iowa, and we leave for Hawaii in a week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 1:35 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.