Xmas Post I: Chicago to New York Travels

First off--Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to everyone! Hope that you are all having a festive, joyous, and safe holiday. I've barely had any down time since last Friday--a vacation trip to Chicago with Sarah, with a flight straight to New York after that for the holidays. I am currently out on Long Island with the family, with a net connection... thus I'm spending an evening catching up on blogging. There will probably be a whack of posts; this is just a writeup of the travel back from Chicago (MDW) to New York (LGA).

First of all, I think that I pretty much lucked out on travels this holiday season--my sympathies for those of you who have gotten stranded or delayed here and there. There were all of these air travel clusterbumps on the East Coast and in the Midwest... and by sheer luck, my itinerary avoided all of them. For instance, the huge snowstorm that hit the East Coast last weekend? Yep, flew out on the Friday before it hit.

The MDW-LGA trip was on the 23rd, so I was expecting at least somewhat bad holiday traffic. Yeah. This is what check-in looked like:


Yikes. There was a line wrapping around the winding cordoned area. We arrived at the terminal over an hour early... and I was already getting worried. The line was progressing pretty slowly... as we moved forward, I found out why:


Yeah, five or six dead check in terminals, out of that bank of 12. Thanks guys. But even scarier--check out what OS they are running underneath that:


Admittedly, though, I still run a Windows 2000 machine. Also, I think I'd be even more worried if it were a Windows 7 startup screen ;).

Managed to get to the gate just as my boarding group was called... smooched Sarah, and got on the plane. Made it! Whew.