Excitement… I got a note from Delta that my flight was delayed out of Philadelphia and I would not make my connection. I got on the computer and found an earlier flight which had been delayed since 0900! Hence, a rush to the airport in sort of awful conditions.
Sheets of rain. Still, they are telling us that we are going to leave.
The drive from the conference back to Philly was lovely. Lots of hills and lush green. Great cars, too.
When we got in and cleaned up, it was off to the Union League Club to meet priests for supper. Wonderful time.
That was just to start.
I’ll try to update along the way if my phone will cooperate.
UPDATE
After ANOTHER delay we are on board abd so is my bag. What will happen next is anybody’s guess.
Now there is a fuel truck.
From what i can tell there was a problem with the original plane which is why this flight was originally at 0900.
They keep whittling away at my layover in ATL.
Onboard chess game is not very good.
More later.
UPDATE
AN HOUR LATER AND WE ARE STILL ON THE GROUND IN PHL
Will this trip never end?
Even if we can get on the way shortly. I don’t know about the connection.
UPDATE
They … damn … it’s complicated but I’m going to be stuck in Atlanta.
I sense a hotel in my future.
UPDATE 13 July
I got home eventually. There were delays of weather. They took us out to the runway, and then there was an engine issue and brought us back, half deplaned, then they changed their minds. Meanwhile, seeing how this was going to go, I got with the gate agent and provisionally added a flight from ATL for the next morning. There was one slot. If I wouldn’t get that, I’d have to wait until Tuesday.
Very late, they took us to ATL. On the place I booked a hotel room. I got to get some sleep for about $60/hour. That stings.
In the morning, off to ATL and breakfast in the lounge. Everything went smoothly, except there was no trace of by bag. I called the “medalion line”. Zip. On the ground, however, I got a text that my bag was delivered to my destinations baggage carousel at 02:30 AM. Then I got a text that it was in the baggage service office. Sure enough. That means, I think that the final leg of my trip may have left at 01:00 plus change, but there were no boarding texts. I guess they just flew the plane down because it was needed there in the morning. I dunno.
That’s that.
Some images along the way.
65 Plymouth.
i understand why you travel by air to Europe. i do not understand why you travel by air within these nominally united states.
Silver lining: Atlanta counts as time in purgatory. It’s right there in the by-laws.
“I do not understand why you travel by air within these nominally united states.”
The alternatives:
Driving of course. If you have the time and patience to deal with traffic, have to factor in hotel stopovers for long trips.
Amtrak is fairly infrequent outside of the Boston to Washington corridor, many lines only run once a day and they are often late. Okay if you are retired like my wife and I and have time to build in layovers for connections.
Greyhound has cut many routes and is not for the faint of heart.
That leaves flying, for better or worse. For some reason the richest country in the world cannot afford high speed trains as they have in Europe and even countries like Morocco.
Union League Club, hmmm?
Tempted to stay long enough for the monthly Vidocq Society meeting?
JonPatrick,
Trust me, the European high speed train experience often resembles flying in an alarming way. Both are just one notch above cattle transport, if unlucky.(especially if you’d make the Spaniards responsible for the security, the French for the legroom and the Germans the timeliness – yes, contrary to the old cliche).
Also, trains make sense along a corridor or in a pattern that radiates from a central point (e.g quite a few European capitals). As soon as you have to connect randomly distributed points, and connect a lot of them, it becomes prohibitively expensive to build all the infrastructure, as the lines between te point will overlap little. The one big advantage of flying is that it needs no infrastructure between start- and end-point. For the US, it’s by and large a lot more efficient.
That said, I hope Fr Z still got some use out of his Sunday.
(Might be interesting, if you’re willing to share, father, how you approach the problem. I take it you weren’t travelling with the necessary kit to say your own Mass, so how do you find a good place?)
The city of Atlanta from Plato’s Timaeus? Hubris crushed by a vengeful Poseiden.
Make sure your scuba gear is in order!
On the topic of trains, one of the greatest secular joys, if not the greatest secular joy, of any time I spend in Italy is taking the trains. Yes, it’s not a perfect system (such as that time I nearly had to make an unexpected overnight stay in Pavia due to…circumstances) but even with its flaws, the passenger rail simply blows Amtrak out of the water, in my experience.
Fr. Z:
Well I know you enjoyed your sojourn to West Virginia and my former second home (Philadelphia) but I hope with the delays you were able to get caught up on some sleep.
During the January 2026 snowstorm I missed a connection and had to find a hotel in Miami. I had to pay more than what I wanted, but I was glad I had enough of a credit card balance and a rideshare account (and it was mid-afternoon so I had time to find a decent place) , and I could think of worse places than Miami to be stranded.
“For some reason the richest country in the world cannot afford high speed trains as they have in Europe and even countries like Morocco.”
@JonPatrick: I have a great deal of nostalgia for travel by rail remembering doing it as a child during the 1950’s. But it is not a question of “can we afford”, rather a question of relative economic values. Are the resources that would be used to build a high speed train more valuable elsewhere? Even if we limit the elsewhere to transportation, the answer would be “no”. The United States is just not densely populated enough for passenger trains and buses (common carriers) to be economically viable. (That is, the cost of building and operating the systems is greater than the present value of the revenues that would be generated by passengers.)
I do know that the safest way to travel is by air and the second safest by automobile. There is an AMTRAK stop near where I live, I think it stops every other day. The only people whom I know who have used it were college age kids who wanted to drink their way to New Orleans and their way back.
Automobiles and airplanes actually allow much more flexibility, so that in most rural areas passenger travel by rail disappeared by around 1960 and the fact that AMTRAK is subsidized shows that its services are less valuable than the cost of providing them.
NickD I feel the same about travel in the UK whose train system is much maligned there but is extensive and when things go pear-shaped there are alternatives.
I am looking forward to a trip in October that will take us by train from Munich to Verona (OBB) and then on to Rome via Frecciarosa.
Trains????? You have not traveled by train until you take a Japanese shinkansen (bullet train). Overall the Japan Rail system is by far the best under Heaven; and compared with Europe and the USA, JR is always on time … even when it isn’t. There are some delays (seconds … sometimes minutes) but with all the rail traffic going on in Tokyo, I’d say the system is as close to perfect as you can get.
— Guy