Impulse

[Detroit, MI]
Travel sure is dif­fer­ent these days. The aiport clo­sures fol­low­ing 9/11/01 marooned sev­eral of my then-coworkers in Texas (poor souls). Failing to find a flight for sev­eral days, they ended up rent­ing a car and dri­ving all the way back to Seattle. Later one of those cowork­ers was on a flight back from Europe when a bomb scare forced the plane to make an emer­gency land­ing at an aban­doned air­field in Greenland where he spent sev­eral days as secu­rity gave every­thing a thor­ough search.
I’m happy to say that I dont see this coworker any­where nearby. Hopefully, he’s sip­ping a beer some­where back in Seattle.

I remem­ber hear­ing about the bombs that hit London as I fin­ished pack­ing for my trip to europe this morn­ing. My sleep deprived brain didn’t reg­is­ter it. I just walked by a huge screen blast­ing CNN here at Detroit air­port and the mes­sage finally got through — London’s been hit.
I stood watch­ing the screen for a few min­utes, but frus­trated by the lin­ear nature of TV news, I bee­lined for this inter­net cafe to cee what the BBC had to say. It was eerie see­ing all those images of places I had been on my last trip to Europe. Still, it was only trou­ble­some in a far­away sort of way. Again, I don’t know any­one there and I’ve only been there once.
What was cool is see­ing the blog­ging com­mu­nity not only cov­er­ing it, but pro­vid­ing sites for help­ing peo­ple find loved ones. They rock! [boing­bo­ing post cov­er­ing it].
To friends / fam­ily who know I’m on the road: I’m hap­pily not going through London on this trip, so it doesn’t effect me, though it’ll make my return oh so enjoy­able. My par­ents, how­ever, are going through London — in fact they’re prob­a­bly there now — luck­ily, they’re tak­ing a char­ter bus between air­ports, so they should be fine.

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