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09/18/2001 Entry: "Back in Ballston"
Well I'm back in Ballston now, and everything looks pretty much the same as it did when I left.
The trip itself was surprisingly calm. We left the hotel at 5:30, got to the Petaluma office around 6:00, dropped off the laptops and my bag at the shipping department, and headed for the airport. I went back to my original plan of bringing just my cellphone, some books with me.
We got minorly losted trying to find the car rental drop off, but made it to the airport around 8:00. The rental car dropoff was normal, and by 8:30 we were through the ticket line and past security. There were a lot of cops of various flavors, but no obvious military people - no one with machine guns or anything like that. The shops were open. Most people had carry on luggage, so of it much larger than it should have been, and lots of people had laptops.
Increased security for me consisted of showing my ticket and ID to 3 or 4 people in quick succession, and then waving that wand-thing waved around me for a while. Bing made it through the security without having his backpack being checked. One bit of security weirdness was that after we dropped off the rental car, Bing, I and two other people made a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the workers portion of the car rental building. We all turned around, and eventually found our way to the airport shuttle.
Then we waited for three hours until the plane took off. We had given ourselves a lot more time than the two hours suggested by the airlines, since we were coming in 70 miles outside of Sand Francisco, and didn't know what the rush hour would be like. Turns out there apparently isn't a rush hour in San Francisco, or at least it begins after 8:00AM !
The flight itself was pretty normal and uneventful. The only bit of weirdness was when a guy, who I assume was a marshal, went to the front of the plane and read a magazine for a couple of minutes in the middle of the flight.
After we landed, I bummed a ride with Bing's family from Baltimore back to Northern Virginia. I has happy to see my car was intact, but I still removed the bumpersticker anyway. Then I went off to the store and bought some toiletries, since I left them all in my travel bag. All in all, it took about 16 hours to get back from the time I left the hotel to the time I got in my apartment. It will be good to sleep in my own bed tonight. I will be aiming at getting into the office around noon tomorrow.
