Long day of travel

I'm sitting in the Orlando airport waiting to get on a plane to DC. This is going to be a long day… I got up around 4AM Eastern and I won't get to bed before midnight Pacific, making it a 23 hour day, easily.

Here's the plan: I fly to DC and get in around 9, leave my bags at the carousel (and hope they don't wander off) and take the Metro into town. I meet with the folks on my team at Union Station, then go to a meeting with Senator Murray's staff at 12:30.

I'll have to eat in there somewhere but my next leg leaves National at 5:45, so I'll want to get back there by 4 so I can get my bags out of hock, check them in on my next flight, and then fly to Chicago where I have a one hour layover.

But, if this works out, we'll get a contract to take care of a roads inventory for reservations, which is sorely needed as the current system is filled with errors, lies, and is keeping tribes from fixing roads. Which means people are dying because of bad data.

The meeting was sort of a surprise for me. I bought my ticket Thursday (just before going to Miami), and went to the mall Sunday to get a dress shirt and a tie. While I packed a suit, I didn't bother to pack a tie or a business shirt. I just don't think that deep, plumb shirt I wore to the clubs in Miami would work well in the Senatorial halls in DC.

Surprisingly, it's cheaper to cram in all my travel and the meeting on the same day. First off, I think it's next to impossible to get a room in DC on short notice; then there's the fact that I was only paying 150 a night in Miami, which would be hard to match in DC.

But, it's going to be a long day.

7:17 AM

The flight is only about half full, so I have a whole row to myself. Of course, the guy in front of me has pushed his seat ALL the way back, which wouldn't be so bad except, for some bizarre reason, he has his hand on the top of his seat. So, I moved over one, which gives me enough room to type this note.

3:08 PM Eastern

My flight leaves in an hour and a half, so I found a little sushi place in the terminal and I'm taking a moment to write this up.

Meetings went well, but in DC who really knows what 'well' means. No one ever says you have an ugly baby, and no one in DC is going to tell you that your visit has no merit.

But, as for the trip itself, it's really an amazing world we live in when you can wake up, get on a plane, and then ride into town with the commuters almost 1,000 miles away. I know that some people do this all the time, but I don't know if the jarring sense of dislocation really ever goes away.

I mean, when I got up, it was warm and muggy. I sat outside on a bench listening to the lapping splashing of the courtyard fountain while waiting for my cab, feeling over dressed and warm in my suit and long jacket.

When I got off the plane in DC, I simply walked out of the terminal, pulled out the Metro ticket that has been knocking around my wallet since last spring, and got on a train. The transition from Orlando to DC, from warm to cold, from casual vacation attire to business suits, seemed more sudden than the couple hours in the air allowed.