I'm back! With Pictures!

Hello everyone! I am now back from Houston and am damn tired. It was a good visit, however, that included a road to the home of chicken fried bacon, Sodolak's Original Country Inn! I have lot's of stories and pictures that I can post, but to keep the post sizes manageable I'll break them up. So, let me start with day one:

Day one actually started on Friday afternoon. I caught my flight out of Raleigh after a slight ten minute delay on way to Atlanta for my connecting flight. I got on and took my seat next to a rather attractive mommy with an 8 months old baby. It was to be a short flight, however, and the baby seemed in good spirits. Unfortunately, as we came to Atlanta there was a nasty thunderstorm and no planes were allowed to land or take off. We circled above a few times waiting for the storms to move, but began to run low on fuel and had to land in Augusta for refueling and to wait for Atlanta to reopen. So, after a half an hour detour to this new airport we got to sit on the tarmac for about an hour. At this time the baby sitting next to me started to become fussy and I changed seats with the mommy so she could have the inside seat to more discreetly breast feed her child. Sitting that close next to a stranger who is breast feeding her baby is rather uncomfortable, no matter how friendly and hot she was.

But, I survived the ordeal and the plane finally took off and landed in Atlanta. Everyone in the plane is now happy to get off as we pull up to the gate. Of course, nothing is that easy. The mechanized gate that they pull up to the plane got jammed and wouldn't move. So we all wait in the plane right in front of our gate for an engineer to come and try to fix it. About half an hour later, finally they tell us to go to another gate, which we finally do, and everyone rushes off the plane in rather foul moods. I was only delayed about 2 hours at this point, which would get me into Houston at around 11pm.

So, I board my connecting flight after a very short wait, and am in pretty good spirits as the flight wasn't full and I had an empty seat next to me, rather than a crying baby. Everyone gets on the plane and we're ready to go, right? Nope, the pilot comes over the speaker and tells us that we are waiting for 4 bags to be bought over and loaded on the plane. Half an hour later, he comes on again and says that we are still waiting for the bags. Forty five minutes later, either the bags show up or the pilot gets sick of waiting and takes off. I finally got into Houston a bit after midnight and met up with phishbone23 and his lady for a dinner and some beer before last call, which was 1:30. We then went to their lovely house and slept, getting ready for an exciting day two!