Not flying.

Ok, I am back. I came back in Boston on Tuesday afternoon, from New York, not flying. From Dallas I made it to Newark (NJ) on Sunday, with a direct flight that a very helpful American Airline agent found me (without needs to go through Florida). Of course when I arrived in Newark there was no way to continue to Boston, as the Logan airport was still closed (apparently out of power in the aftermath of the blizzard). The Newark airport was instead open, but not really working very well. Apart for the fire alarm that kept making a loud noise for the whole time I was there, the American check-in was almost deserted, with nobody attending the coach class passengers. After a wait of more than 20 minutes I managed to talk to an annoyed lady that couldn’t go beyond the fact that all flights were still cancelled for the next day. It took me a good 10 minutes to convince her that not having flights for Monday would not prevent her to book me on a flight on Tuesday. After that I left the airport to go to New York city with a bus, because the train system of the airport was shut down as a consequence of the snow storm.

Fortunately I have a friend in New York city, so I spent the night there. Given that I didn’t really want to wait until Tuesday to come back home, I managed to reserved a bus seat for the next morning (in fact Mayli made the reservation on the internet). On Monday morning I wandered around the snow encrusted high rise canyons of Manhattan, until I got too cold and had to enter in a bookstore to warm up until the time for the bus. As I was saying, I boarded the bus after noon, arriving in Boston by 5PM.

Arrived in downtown Boston I was lucky enough to find a cab driving me home, in a surreal white urban landscape where all cars were completely hidden under a white fluffy cap. The taxi driver was a nice talkative fella, that talked me about his driving adventures in the snow storm (he drove 36 hours straight because every time he tried to stop there was somebody begging him to drive him home), including the experience with a young lady that suddenly opened the door and run away instead of paying her passage.

Anyway, I am feeling now like the birds in the photo above (shot at a beach in la Jolla a few weeks ago): I would just want to stay put here, with my two feet on solid ground, and no flying please. The only problem is that next week I will have indeed to fly to Europe, because I have to give an invited talk on Cepheids at a workshop on interferometry in Paris. Oh, well...

In the meantime, today has been snowing again and we have 10 new inches of snow on top of the feet that fell while I was desperately trying to fly home.