Omen?

2011 will hold a lot of travel for me. I've got a trip to Austin coming up in spring, a wedding in Atlanta in May, and a pre-wedding party in a city which is still TBA in April. I'll move from New York to California sometime in the summer, and will most likely visit my brother and his wife in Berlin in July - August. And of course, best of all, I'm hoping to have an international teaching post to go to right before the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. My return to New York after spending the holidays at home was my first trip of 2011, and I'm not sure whether its events constitute a good omen or a bad omen for all the travel to come.

I woke up early on Wednesday morning to shower and do some last-minute packing up before my mom drove me to the Fresno airport. With about 15 minutes left in the hour-long drive, I got an automated call from Delta telling me that my flight from Fresno was delayed. I was supposed to connect in LA, and with the new departure time, it looked like I wasn't going to make it. Nothing for it but to keep driving, however. In Fresno, just as I got to the front of the line for my turn with the ticket agent, the departure, which had been moved from 9:15 to 10:25, changed to 11:20 on the screen. Now it seemed that in addition to missing the flight I'd originally planned to take from LA, I'd miss the following one as well. Obviously this was all frustrating, but as I didn't have anything I absolutely had to do in New York until Thursday afternoon, I wasn't too worried. Mom and I went for a cup of tea to kill some time, and about 20 minutes later there was an announcement that all American Eagle morning flights had been canceled. Oh boy...

Calling the airline was preferable to waiting in a very long line. After a frustrating few minutes trying to work my way through automated prompts, I got through to an agent at American, who explained that she was powerless to help me because, despite the fact that I was supposed to check in at the American Airlines counter and would have been boarding an American Airlines plane had all gone well, the flight was actually run by Delta. Um. She looked up the number for me, and I got through to very nice agent at Delta almost immediately. She said there were no more flights out of Fresno that day. All would have been lost, and my mom was making outrageous suggestions about driving me to the airport in LA, when we realized that I could call Luke. I can't even remember how old I was when my family and Luke's family began to spend time together, vacation together, etc., but I was definitely in elementary school. Luke lives in San Diego, but he had been in Visalia for a few days on business and was planning to drive back home that morning. I called him immediately, and he said he'd be happy to drop me off at LAX on his way. So Mom and I got back in the car and drove to Visalia, where she was in time to teach her social studies class and I got to hang out with some of the teachers for a while until Luke picked me up. We had a pleasant, smooth ride to LA, which included pretty scenery over a snowy Grapevine and a stop at In-N-Out Burger. (Vegetarians get grilled cheese sandwiches there.) I arrived at LAX in plenty of time and was through security in a jiffy. Although my plane left the runway a few minutes late, it boarded on time and I got a whole row of seats to myself. We arrived early in New York, and I was so comfortable and content I was almost disappointed.

Off the plane, things changed for the worse. The A train took forever to come, and the platform one must wait on is outdoors. I estimate that it was just below 30 degrees, and it got mighty chilly after the first few minutes. Of course, that late at night, the A doesn't run express and so we paused at every single stop along the route home. All told, my plane touched the ground at 12:25 or so and I wasn't inside my building until minutes before 3:00 in the morning.

Overall good, or overall bad? Unquestionably, it was a mixed bag, which is guess is about the best anyone can expect from travel.