Day 5

Wednesday, June 4

I realize that traveling at this time of the year is always a risky proposition. These crazy storms can pop-up at anytime, anywhere and that is exactly what happened. I left San Diego at 8 AM (11 AM my time). Everything seemed okay until we got into the Washington area. We ended up circling the airport for about an hour. The pilot finally came on and said there were some strong storms in the area and we weren't allowed to land, but we were running out of fuel. We were diverted to Greensboro, NC. We refueled there and spent about an hour or so just parked on the ground. Finally, when we were done refueling, we took off and landed just between storms. All told, it took me about 11 hours to get back from San Diego yesterday, and yes, I'm at work, exhausted.

Human behavior is a curious thing. When you think what you have to do is so very important, all common-sense goes out the window. There were several people on my flight that were international travels trying to make a connection at Dulles (or Dull-ass, we we like to call the area). They were spitting mad that we couldn't land and they couldn't make their connection. I wondered if they thought it would be okay to land in the middle of a tornado (which is why we were circling - the airport was actually closed) so they can make their flight. Probably. What I thought is that if we weren't landing, their planes probably weren't taking off. This didn't occur to them. They thought nothing of ringing the call button and laying-into the flight attendant. Like the flight attendant would be able to do something about it anyway.

All in all, the conference was a great deal of fun and I enjoyed catching up with some friends in San Diego. Next year the ASTD ICE will be here in Washington. I may take a pass and see if I can attend Elliot Masie's Learning 2009 in Orlando instead.

Thanks for reading!