home again, then off again

I picked Dad up from the airport at 11PM last night. His flight arrived at 10:25PM, but taxied to some sort of holding area because (Dad thinks) it didn't have a gate assigned to it when it landed. That, or the assigned gate was still occupied by a previous flight. Dad found this strange: Delta now has a profusion of gates to itself, ever since it took over Dad's old employer, Northwest Airlines. Whatever had gone wrong, Dad was forced to waste time doing nothing until the plane could slide into a gate. For my part, I spent my time circling the airport over and over. Out of boredom, I set my trip odometer and discovered that the loop I was traveling was 1.3 miles long. I did that loop about ten times. I had wanted to park in the cell phone waiting area (a parking space for people who are waiting for a call from arriving passengers ready for pickup), but the area was chock-full. I guess there were a lot of late-arriving flights.

In any case, Dad's now home, but he's not planning to settle in: instead, he's leaving for the on-the-road part of his odyssey today. I bought him a new GPS navigation system, a Garmin nüvi 265WT, and the friction mount for the device is arriving from Amazon this morning or afternoon. Dad had prepped the travel gear for this stage of his journey even before he had left for the Philippines, so he has little to do but pack it all in the van and peel off. His road trip will be taking him to South Carolina, Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and upstate New York before he heads back down to northern Virginia. Quite a ride.


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