Winter Approaches

November 6, 1994

Well, October is over, and I'm on the road again ... I'm writing this while waiting for American flight 98 to take off. This trip takes me to Brussels, Copenhagen, Aalborg, Zurich, Vienna, and Amsterdam before returning home for Thanksgiving.

It's pretty clear that fall is coming to an end and winter is approaching -- now that Daylight Savings time has ended, it gets dark at 5 PM here in NYC. That was just about when I left for the airport this afternoon; the sky was a dark purple, and the apartment buildings and skyscrapers were silhouetted against the sky as the taxi took me over the Triboro Bridge to JFK airport. It was a winter kind of sky, though it's been fairly warm here in the city for the past couple of weeks. By contrast, I'm anticipating cold drizzle and dark skies in Europe. The last time I was in Amsterdam in late November, it didn't get light until 9 o'clock in the morning, and it was dark by 4 in the afternoon. Ugh.

It's a good thing I left somewhat early for the airport this afternoon, because traffic was snarled all over the place as a result of the NY Marathon. The two winners from Mexico crossed the finish line around 1 PM, but the rest of the herd was still jogging slowly down First Avenue and through Central Park when I left at 5, and the last stragglers probably won't make it to the finish line until around midnight. As a result, it was almost impossible to get from the west side to the east side of Manhattan; the taxi had to make a detour through Harlem, but we eventually got there safely.

This is one of those trips when I'm "travelling heavy," which makes the whole procecess a bit more cumbersome. I normally pack all of my stuff into a couple of carry-on bags, but I've got 11 different presentations to make in 6 cities, so I've got a lot more junk than usual -- and since I've got a three-day weekend between Vienna and Amsterdam, I brought some books to read and some casual clothes -- and the resulting ten-ton suitcase and super-heavy garment bag are probably enough to make the plane fly lop-sided all the way across the Atlantic... But there's a certain logic to my packing routine: I figure that if I'm going to have to check a bag, I might as well check a lot; and since many of the intra-Europe airlines have cramped seats and tiny overhead baggage compartments, they often won't let me take as many bags on board as I can get away with in the U.S. ... so I've got lots of goodies with me to amuse myself while I'm away on this trip.