This weekend is awful for anyone flying from the east coast of the US to anywhere else. Snow in the form of blizzards shut airports from Washington DC (Dulles and Reagan National) to Boston Logan. The knock-on effect has been awesome in its scale.
Weather is one thing, but political stuff-ups are another. Planning to collect a customer from Miami International last night, I lobbed in the carpark at 8:30 for his 8:15 pm scheduled arrival. It always take a minimum of thirty minutes to clear immigration and customs at MIA, so I was in good time.
Too good a time, as the monitors now showed the flight from Venezuela arriving at 10:30 pm. Great. Two hours and fifteen minutes late.
My natural instinct is to work forward to get a rough idea of my "get to bed" hour. If he arrives at 10:30, thirty minutes for I and C, fifteen minutes faffing around getting to the car, three and a half hours to his house, get gas, clean interior of limo, return limo, drive home. 04:30. Yet more good news.
My customer was in decent humour, and we chatted about his day.
"Everything is rotten in Venezuela" he said, a native himself and so qualified to talk. "Nobody cares. It's a ruin".
After mulling on that for the drive back, my 4:30 am crawl into bed didn't seem so bad.
