The Kansas City (MO) International airport feels like a big airport when you’re driving to it and when you enter the airport campus. Inside the terminal though, its a whole different story.
There are 8 gates inside the security checkpoint – but I can’t figure out why they bother with all 8 numbers since, gates 61 and 62 use the same door, 63 and 64 use the same door, and 65-69 use the same door. Inside the security checkpoint, there are no restrooms, no restaurants, and only one small food kiosk with water, premade sandwiches, etc..
I love these small airports. The TSA guys are low-key and friendly – this is a big deal for me when I’m traveling with 2 laptops in my bag. I always feel rushed and somewhat uneasy going through those checkpoints and I almost considered checking one of my laptops in my luggage to avoid the ordeal of pulling them both out at security. I decided this wasn’t a good idea and instead planned to pack my carry on bag as lightly as possible to make things easier. For the record – I’ve never had an issue with TSA in Detroit, they’re generally very pleasant there, even when the lines are long. All in all, traveling with 2 laptops hasn’t been as bad as I’d imagined.
Why 2 laptops? Well, aside from the fact that I’m a big nerd, there is a reason. Nick and I wanted to be able to use skype or ichat to have some video convo’s this week. I have a camera built into the macbook which makes things much much easier. Also, my itunes library is on my macbook and .. well .. its kind of my baby 😉 .. but, I still wanted to bring my work laptop with me since I knew I was leaving some things hanging open at work and I wanted to be able to respond if needed. My work laptop has some tools that won’t run on the Mac and our SSL VPN software doesn’t yet support the new Leopard OS – so I couldn’t have done much with my macbook for work. When I get a bigger hard drive, I want to run parallels or VM so that I can have a windows install with my work tools on it. That will be ideal. Traveling with 2 laptops isn’t terrible, but its still heavy and space consuming. And kind of ridiculous 😉
So here I am, at MCI (or is it KCI? road signs say one thing, while everything online says something else .. weird). This nice small airport even has free wi-fi – slow, but free. My flight was delayed by 20 minutes due to pilot restrictions, but I’m still expected to land in detroit before 1.
Its been a good week, but I’m ready to be home. I hope that my week away from normal life is what I needed to reset my brain and knock me out of the frantic mode I’ve been running in for the past month. February was a nightmare that I hardly remember. Our trip to Vegas seems so long ago and I have mixed guilt about my trip to Rays (as wonderful of a trip that it was, I missed my last opportunity to say goodbye to my friend before he passed away – I really thought I had more time. More on this in another post someday). John’s passing created chaos at work with hospital visits, funeral and added workload in between – not to mention, trying to plan this trip which was originally supposed to be to San Francisco and changed to KC just last week. Mix in the MMBA annual meeting, a Poto chapter event in Ypsi, a women’s night at MBF followed by a planning meeting with the ED and President and the membership suddenly interested in all things merchandise.
I was just hanging on by a thread and reached the absolute end of my patience with my 20 yr old stepson last week. We had it out over email and he’s been at is grandparents’ place ever since.
So, I think, having a week to myself with no place to go (no car to get me anywhere) was what I needed.
I used to like to fly. Now, I drive. More freedom.
I used to fly through Marquette all the time. EVERY time I flew out of there, I got searched. I was always the person they grabbed. I think they were profiling. Yeah. They were searching all the non-Finlander looking people. 😉 Seriously, though, what are the odds that you’re going to be the one to get searched.