1st
Thanks to New York Press for publishing my piece - it was my first piece for them!
Last year, I managed to miss five flights, out of probably three times as many total, due to lateness, transportation errors and general disorganization. Most of them weren’t such a big deal; I could take the next one out, or pay a fee and wait around a few hours. I don’t tend to mind, since it gives me time to catch up on the gossip magazines in the airport bookstore. I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to flying, I’m just not very good at it. Maybe it’s my squeamishness about air travel that comes out via tardiness, or the fact that while I like going away, I always feel like I’m missing something back home while I’m gone.
But I can tell you that one of those missed flights yielded one of the hottest nights of my life. The reason I missed this flight is probably the dumbest of all: I had two hours to kill in the airport in Atlanta, on the way home from Miami last February. That seemed like a huge amount of time, so I plopped down, opened a book, and promptly got lost in it. When I looked at the time, I then realized I had half an hour to catch my flight, so grabbed my stuff, got some food, and headed to my gate. Only the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is designed in such a way that to get to my gate took more than just an elevator ride; by the time I reached it, the flight was no longer boarding, and there were no more planes heading to New York that night. Well, I had a book to review so figured I’d amp myself up with caffeine and get cracking.
