Back Home (Sort Of)

It was our last day in New York, and we had a bit if time before our plane went out from Newark, so we basically wandered the streets and hung at the interesting sites we stumbled across. We spent more time than was necessary in the Virgin Records at Times Square, especially since Chicago has its very own Virgin Records. But the stocks are different enough that I was able to come up with a couple of Art Brut singles that I've never found in Chicago, a Sebastian Tellier single that I've seen once and didn't snap up, and a Futureheads single at half price. They've got a nice $10 CD sale going, and in the import bin I found that price tag on a double set of Bluetones singles and B-sides.

The trip home was uneventful but took forever. Our shuttle picked us up three hours and thirty-five minutes before our flight was due to leave, but given that we might encounter rush-hour traffic and we didn’t know what we'd face at the security line, that didn't seem extravagant. Well, we didn’t encounter that kind of traffic--our time from Times Square to Newark airport was half an hour. Security wasn't much of a problem, either (although they did want to check my contact lens solution and I forgot to take the Blackberry, the cell phone, and my keys out of my pockets), so we were at our gate two hours and fifteen minutes before it was supposed to start boarding. Given that it was late arriving from wherever it came from, we sat there another hour longer, and then (it virtually goes without saying these days) waited on the runway for another little while after that. It took us 9 hours and 15 minutes to make it from where we were staying in New York back to our home. Mapquest says it would've taken us 12 hours and 56 minutes to have driven it, so I guess we saved some time, at least. More complete blogging will pick up again tomorrow.

(I have to confess that because we're so late and I want to go to bed as soon as I can once I get home, I'm word processing this entry on the plane. Those calculations in the previous paragraph were set up after I got back to my desk in my office. As I'm typing this, I don't know how long the complete trip will take. I'm not sure why I'm confessing this, because I can't imagine that you’re actually that fascinated by the mechanics of my blogging.)