I haven’t put up a new post in a couple of days now which is very unusual for me. I’ve got a good reason — note I said reason, not excuse — as I’ve been traveling and the circumstances of that travel meant there wasn’t internet accessibility often or consistently.
I left Tuesday 4/29 for New York — I’d been subpoenaed to appear in a Federal trial as I wrote earlier. My scheduled flight left Greenville at 7:30AM and in order to be at the airport and through security in time to make it, I had to get up at 3:45AM.
Of course the day started off badly in that the blouse I had planned to wear on the trip was nowhere to be found. I had gone through my closet twice even. I put on a pair of shoes that I normally wear to clean the dog kennels in — you know the kind, I’m sure. Comfortable, stained, ratty looking and a bit smelly (ok a LOT smelly!). I ran out to the camper to see if the blouse was out there even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t and I was correct, it wasn’t. So I gave up looking for that blouse and chose another to wear as time was getting short. I fixed the food for my husband to feed my birds over the next two days and got all the other things settled that needed settling prior to walking out the door.
Ken usually leaves for work at 5:00AM, so he followed me down the driveway and since we were roughly heading in the same direction, down the road towards the nearest town to our house. A few miles out, he phoned me to ask how long had my headlight been out. Having no idea how long, I said as much and he requested I stop at the gas station where he usually leaves his car as he car-pools the rest of the way to work from there where we could switch cars. He didn’t want me chancing getting a ticket for the pop-eye which was sweet of him, but that’s how he is anyway. So I stopped and we switched cars and I headed on to the airport.
I thought things had improved since I found a parking spot in the garage at the airport that was fairly close to the terminal, so didn’t have to schlep my stuff too awful far and there wasn’t much of a line at either the ticket counter or security check in, but there I found that I had forgotten to change shoes. UGH! These shoes are really ratty and VERY smelly and I wasn’t looking forward to spending two days in them. I had also not put on socks as my original intent was to only wear them while traipsing through the wet grass out to the camper and back. Oh well, worse things and all that.
So, I get to my gate without further ado and await my boarding call which came promptly and proceeded to board the plane. At the best of times, my knees are cranky and uncooperative especially when it comes to steep stairs, but the airports have these nice ramps, right?? Not for this flight they didn’t. Down a steep, narrow and rickety feeling set of steps to the tarmac and up an equally steep and narrow set of steps into the airplane. What I had originally thought was a nice seat towards the front of the plane (row 11) was actually a seat at the BACK of the plane since it only had 12 rows of seats period. Not looking forward to that ride I can assure you. My fellow passengers finish boarding and stowing and belting up and we await the revving of engines and rush down the runway. Instead we get the pilot announcing “the computer read-out says something we don’t like, so we’re going to reboot it and see if it clears itself up. Everything will go dark and quiet until we boot back up again”. No problem — I’m very familiar with rebooting computers, so nothing at all to panic about. We wait through the quiet and subsequent re-lighting of interior lights only to hear “Sorry folks, but that didn’t clear it up and you’re all going to have to get off the plane, go back to ticketing so they can get you on an alternate flight.” ICK! Back down narrow steep steps my by now loudly complaining knees carry me but at least I didn’t have to climb back up the rickety feeling ones as our route back into the terminal had us climbing a set of concrete steps instead.
Back at ticketing, I call the people who are supposed to be meeting me and advise them of the problem and promise to call back once I have a new flight plan in place. Of course there isn’t a flight I can get on for another 4 hours, so I settle down to wait it out — I mean where can I go? It’s another plane just like the first one, so we’re all joking about this one having similar problems and getting bounced again, but this one took off without a hitch and in an hour and 45 minutes I’m in Washington DC‘s Regan International Airport for the hour wait there for my connecting flight to LaGuardia. While there, I decide to grab a bite to eat and chose a mexican food stand as a likely candidate. I got my food fairly quickly and searched without finding an empty table to eat at. I had to settle for a chair at the gate and of course, dribbled hot sauce on my until then pristine white blouse. ARGH! No vendors in the airport offered anything remotely resembling a plain white anything although I was tempted to buy a t-shirt that had FBI emblazoned on it. I SHOULD have bought the hoodie with Air Force One Crew on it as it was cold (45F) in New York when I got there and I had not brought a jacket with me.
When I got to LaGuardia, the agent who was to meet me called and said he would be waiting outside baggage claim (he sounded a bit miffed that I had checked luggage to begin with). I maybe could have not checked any baggage, but I already had my purse and laptop and didn’t want to go through the liquids in baggies and trying to squish the small suitcase into an overhead compartment routine that nearly everyone traveler on the flights did. It’s not like it took long for my luggage to appear on the turnstile anyway.
He tells me that he’s driving a silver Bonneville with smoked glass windows. I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t know a Bonneville from an Accord, but managed to locate him without too much trouble. On the way to the courthouse, he regaled me with a running spiel worthy of any tour guide. He kept warning me that it would take an hour or more to get there because of traffic and how slow it would be that time of day, but we clipped along at a fairly quick pace which he marveled at the entire way.
He warns me that the Federal Courthouse on Long Island doesn’t look anything like a courthouse and he’s correct — it looks like a Soviet apartment building with a missile silo stuck on it. He said he thought it looked like a mental hospital and I replied, well maybe the occupants belonged in one, but…. he laughed at that.
He took me up to the Prosecutor’s office where I waited for them to get out of court for the day. Once the Prosecutor gets there, I’m taken into a room where he briefs me on the questions he’ll ask the following day and tells me that if I don’t understand a question to say that I don’t understand it, not try to make up an answer. He also tells me that he can refresh my recollection by showing me a document. I’ve never testified in any kind of case before so this is all new to me and rather interesting.
When we’re finished, I’m sent back to the room I was in before only now there’s someone else in there. We’re admonished to not talk about our specific involvement in the case and left alone, so we talk about other stuff like where are you from and how was your trip and so forth. About an hour later, they bring a lady in and take the man out, so I repeat the conversation with her and when they’re done with the man, we’re all taken downstairs to a waiting car and to our hotel. It’s 9:00PM and I’m worn to the bone and hungry. I check in, throw my stuff in my room, then head downstairs to the restaurant for a meal.
I order a steak medium rare as is my choice of done-ness and it’s brought after a reasonable wait. However, once I dig into it, I discover that it’s not only not medium rare, it’s well done. I have to wait until the waitress zips through the cubby they’ve stuck me in to get her to take the steak back and have another cooked. When she brings it back, it’s the correct done-ness, but now there are no vegetables on the plate — guess my being so ugly and refusing their burnt offering negates my deserving any vegetables. Oh well, I eat the steak and pay my bill (I even left a tip although I was tempted to not leave as much as I did — I mean she didn’t even fill up my water glass and you KNOW how picky I am about that!) and go back to my room for some much needed shut eye.
I do set up my computer and get on the internet just long enough to read important emails, but am too tired to stay on long — by then it’s 11:30PM. I set the alarm to get me up at 5:30 so I can log into work and run my daily reports, shower, get breakfast and repack my bag before meeting everyone in the lobby at 8:00AM.
more later….
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