air travel is not that well organized

I am in the Orlando airport and my connecting flight to Miami is delayed, but I should be able to catch my connection to Merida. The best part of the Orlando airport so far is that I just ran into Ava and Antonio! Ava is on her way to collect research for her dissertation in anthropology in the fishing village. Antonio is going to be a good boy and stay home to write his. She'll be gone for six months!

I had the unfortunate travel experience in June to go to Atlanta to give a presentation at the regional EDUCAUSE conference. The conference session went great--five students from five universities in Atlanta talked about their technology usage--but the travels sucked. First of all, I bought a ticket out of JAX because it was $123 compared to $900 out of GNV. We boarded the plane in JAX at 7:30 pm and were ready to roll when the pilot said, "um...there's a broken part on the plane so I'm not flying until we fix it." so we got off the plane and then hung around for the 2 hour delay. Around 10 pm they announced, "the part still hasn't departed Atlanta...hang around." it wasn't until 1:15 am that we flew to Atlanta. We arrived on Concourse C and then the trains were shut down for the night so I had to walk to the baggage claim (4000 ft). It was like being in a dream--there were a ton of maintenance people in the train chutes and on ladders and more. Then I took a taxi to the hotel in Buckhead. When I got there, there was nobody at the desk. finally after making some noise I got the woman to come out and she said, "I just rebooted the computers like we do every night, so it'll be about 15 minutes before I can check you in." I got into my hotel room at 3:38 am. I had to meet the students at 9 am!

In May, I went to Jamaica for a wedding and the Air Jamaica flight was delayed. Nobody told us anything and we waited in a very long line while nobody was in a rush to do anything. Once we arrived in Jamaica, it made more sense. No problem, mon.