Trip to Nashville... and back

We took a trip on Thursday to Nashville for the day. Our client is located in Music City, so it is theoretically an easy trip via Southwest direct flights to go down and back in a day. This is less disruptive to my family life and my work life.

When we delayed about 30-40 minutes on the way out on a 6:30 am flight, it was not a big deal. But the return… that was another story. After a full day working, we got to the airport about 7:00 for our 8:00 flight. It turned out the plane was coming in from snow-covered Denver and our flight was scheduled to leave at 11:00 (central time). That meant we had about 4 hours to kill in the airport.


A nearly empty airport concourse

I managed to sleep on the floor in airport. Having woken up at 4:30 in the morning, it was no problem to fall asleep. While I was asleep, my collegue, Katie, made friends with a single mom traveling with two small children. Apparently this woman had a few too many on the flight in, and she was having some trouble handling her kids. The World Series was on, so we were able to see the Cardinals win Game 4 and take a 3-1 lead.

Since this single mom needed help with her kids, we concocted a way too elaborate scheme where we were family members, and we could pre-board on this Southwest flight. By the time we got on the plane, it was around 11:45, and the Southwest folks we not very likely to question the make up of “our family.”

When the plane finally landed in Raleigh, the two girls were fast asleep and their mom didn’t know how she was going to get the girls and all their stuff off the plane. We helped gather the girls and their things, said goodbye.

The ultimate measurement of a long day is when you put your parking ticket in the machine to pay for parking before driving out of the parking lot. My ticket registered 20 hours 36 minutes. That’s a long day. By the time I got home it was about 2:40am.

Jeffrey L Cohen

Jeffrey L Cohen