Where In The World?
Each week on the front page of The Monticello News is a picture of a person or family from Jasper County who is traveling anywhere from right down the road a piece to all the way around the world holding up our newspaper that they have carried to some place in the world.
I look forward to reading about their adventures. Amazing how many of our county folk travel about. And it is wonderful that they take their hometown newspaper with them to show in the picture.
As a fellow traveler, they may have had similar experiences to me. My last trip was a few weeks ago to New York City. A few months before the trip, I received an email telling me that my airplane flights had changed. In fact, all of our flights had changed, all five of us. Plans were for all of us to meet in Charlotte and then all fly to Newark, two were flying from New Orleans, one from Knoxville and two of us from Atlanta. After hours on the phone with the sweetest reservation person in the world, Tisa, all the flights were back to normal, on paper that is.
As anyone who flies knows, Atlanta Hartsfield controls the world. How many times have we heard on an airplane the pilot announce, “Well, we are going to have to hold here until we get a go ahead from Atlanta”? Time to pull out the book or start watching the movie as we wait. Remain CALM.
This last trip, everyone arrived on time into Charlotte and then arrived in Newark a few minutes early. All is well. Going back home, another story completely and it started by getting an email on our way to the airport from the airline telling us the flights were delayed.
Arriving at the airport and our gate, the departure time was still the same, but soon the gate agent announced another delay. As soon as this announcement came out of her mouth, we saw a plane pulling up to the jet way. She turned around saw the plane and said, “We have just been told there is another plane”. Yeah, back on schedule, we thought. Boarding the plane, we were on our way when the plane stopped and the pilot announced, “We are going to stop, turn off the engines, and wait for instructions”. And most of us knew where those instructions were coming from.
Our final destination, really don’t like that terminology, Atlanta Hartsfield, is the busiest airport in the world with an average of 275,000 people passing through each day on 2,500 flights per day. Welcome to Atlanta, y’all.