Olio - The Travel Edition

I brought just the right amount of clothes.  Not too many.  Not too few.  I was Goldilocks with the suitcase and I'm feeling fairly smug.

It's a new suitcase, bought to fit American Airlines tiny overhead bins and avoid a charge for bringing a change of underwear along for the ride.  Personally, I'd go for each passenger and her baggage standing on a scale, weighed together.  If we're both over a certain limit, then charge us.  I fail to see the logic in paying $50 to check a bag when it and I together don't come close to the number of pounds the gentleman whose flesh was falling into my seat this afternoon was carrying.
*****
One day, I'm going to arrive at the first gate off the hallway to baggage claim.  It was half a mile to the first moving walkway this afternoon at Detroit Metro; I amused myself by reciting "I can't believe I am able to walk this far" over and over and over and over again.  I was lurching (a little) and hitching (a little) but there were no creaks in my hip and no pain down my leg.

The smoothness will come.  For now, I'm proud to say that I didn't even consider getting a wheelchair.
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There's a workout facility here at the airport hotel and I'm thinking about it.  I'm also thinking about taking a nap.  Getting up and on a train before 7am is not my usual modus operandi.  Sitting next to my little girl and napping made it palatable.... not pleasurable, but palatable nonetheless.  The fact that I could walk out of Union Station, cross the bridge over the Chicago River, and meet my girlfriend on Monroe Street was an added bonus.

I need to remind myself that a year ago, such an adventure would have been impossible.
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I hate to admit it, but I'm loving my Kindle.  The library book I mailed back to myself from the kids' home last October was sitting on their kitchen counter when I arrived last week.  Somehow, the postman had never collected it and they had never mentioned it and the library charged me for it and there it is, all wrapped up and no place to go.

With my Kindle, I have nothing to carry, nothing to mail, and every book I could want at my beck and call.  Of course, I have to remember to charge the battery..... it's a good thing I have Volume 14 of Merle Reagle's Crossword Puzzles to bail me out when the power goes out.  
*****
There was snow on the ground we flew over this afternoon, but none when I arrived in Detroit. There was no snow on the ground in Chicago's western suburbs, either.  That's just wrong.  If I'm going north in January, I should be rewarded with the fluffy white stuff, don't you think?
*****
My plan to watch pay-per-view movies all night is thwarted.  There are no pay-per-view movies in this hotel.  This has never happened to me.  Again, my Kindle will bail me out, but I'm sorry that I won't have the chance to revel in shows TBG would never share.
*****
MTF always checks for bedbugs before she opens her suitcase.  Big Cuter had an infestation that should have put me on the same path.  Yet, here I am, reclining on seven feather pillows on an uninspected bed, typing to you.

I'm afraid that I'll never lose the visual if I lift the mattress and see thousands of moving black spots.  Of course, if I wake up covered in little red dots, what will I have proven?
*****
I do not want to hear anyone say anything about young people today.

Twenty-somethings retrieved dropped items, lifted my suitcase, held doors, shared smiles, and let me precede them down the jetway, promising to hold back the hustling hordes so that no one would bump me.  Somewhere, parents are getting it right.  I told each of them to call their grown-ups and tell them a stranger said, "Good Job!"
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It's time for a pre-prandial nap, denizens.  I'll have a lot of exciting things to describe in the days ahead.  I'm not allowed to tell you why I'm here or what I'm doing but, trust me, it's gonna be great!