Well That Didn’t Work

Alternate title: Where I was.

This absence was two years in the making. My wife spent countless hours planning this, and forcing me to go to stupid timeshare sales pitches. So where was I? I was in Europe for the past three weeks. I will spend a few bytes over a few posts detailing my trip. The reason for the lack of posting? We all know how the EU feels about freedom of speech, so I wasn’t about to access this blog, lest I find myself in some European prison because some Islamist or Eurofag took offense at something I once said on here. I had originally scheduled a bunch of posts to cover things during my absence. I usually do when I am travelling. In this case, my scheduled posts sat there and didn’t post, showing a “failed scheduled” status. WordPress glitch, I suppose. For that reason, the posting on this blog didn’t happen as it was supposed to. The “OPSEC” post was scheduled for the last day in March. It didn’t post until nearly a week later. I didn’t know that until I was airborne over the Atlantic on my way home.

The planning for this trip began two years ago. The time share pitches were through Hilton. It seems that you get a lot of Hilton Honors points if you sit through sales pitches for their timeshare product. My wife would use those points to get us all sorts of things- more on that later, but it turns out those pitches (5 of them in total) wound up saving us about $8 thousand, and we didn’t even have to spend any money on a time share. I guess it was time well spent. My wife is good about finding deals like this.

The time for the trip began with a flight to New Jersey. We left the house and our cats in the possession of our trusted house sitters and headed off to the Orlando airport. As usual, air travel was horrific. We were supposed to land in Newark, but we were stuck orbiting in the area due to unfavorable winds for about 15 minutes. Then it seems the pilot must have only put five bucks’ worth of gas in the plane, because we had to divert to New York’s JFK to get fuel. We were informed the fueling would take about 3 hours, and we were free to leave the plane and drive to Newark, but our checked bags would have to stay on the plane to be retrieved later. We decided to stay.

After fueling, the plane took off and spent an hour flying the eighteen miles to Newark. In all, our original plan to arrive in the hotel in Jersey City by 6pm was thwarted- we didn’t get to the hotel until nearly 1am. I will continue the story tomorrow-