Tag Archives: airlines

Flying on September 11

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NEW ORLEANS–I marked Sept. 11 this year by getting on a plane. That wasn’t my first such observance.

Sept. 11 landing at EWRThis year’s flight brought me here for the Online News Association’s conference. In prior years, I’ve flown on 9/11 for TechCrunch Disrupt and CTIA’s conferences… looking through my calendar, I thought I’d done this more often. Some of those years, it turns out, I flew on the 10th or the 12th of September.

Is it weird that I wish I’d flown more often on Sept. 11?

I have paid my respects at all the 9/11 sites: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanskville, Penn. Those were intensely meaningful visits, and every American who is able should see least one of those memorials.

But another way you can honor this day is to spend time above the clouds.

Today was a good day to do that. I was glad to connect through Newark, so I could see Manhattan’s reborn skyline from the air, then take a moment to appreciate the memorial United employees set up near gate C120 for the crews of UA 93 and UA 175.

A friend has called flying on this day her act of defiance. I’m not sure I’d give myself that much credit. But going to an airport, boarding a plane, and showing a little solidarity with the people of commercial aviation does seem like a decent thing to do.

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Travel checklists

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Sometime after I made the horrifyingly stupid mistake of going to CES without my laptop’s charger (leading to a couple of days of frantic power management that had me feeling a tiny bit like an Apollo 13 mission controller), I added a “Travel checklists” note to my phone to remind me of things I’d need to pack or do at home before heading out.

Travel itemsAside from “phone and laptop chargers,” it had a short list of other things I could see myself forgetting: business cards, snacks, headphones, earplugs and an eye mask for an overnight flight, a spare flash drive (now that they’re a standard PR giveaway, that’s not so important), turning down the heat or air conditioning at home, stopping delivery of the Post, watering the plants, and so on.

The stuff-to-take list has grown increasingly specialized in recent years: a microfiber cloth to clean dirt and fingerprints off gadgets I’m going to photograph, a travel power strip, an external battery pack for my phone, a short ruler to check the dimensions of devices, transit-payment cards for other cities, and Ethernet and HDMI adapters for my MacBook Air. For an international itinerary like tonight’s departure for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, add in a power-plug converter, the tiny tool I need to pop out my phone’s SIM-card tray, a couple of roaming SIMs and any leftover currency from my last trip to the same part of the world.

My ability to stay on top of all those items got a huge upgrade a few years ago when my wife got me this great messenger bag: It may not be as professional-looking as the black Lands’ End canvas attache I carry around town (along with a large fraction of other working Washingtonians), but it’s a lot more comfortable to wear all day. So it’s become my go bag for any travel; almost all of the things itemized above live in it full-time, freeing me from having to think much about them.

The things-to-do-before-departure list, however, has grown more involved since our daughter’s arrival. I try to ease the single-parenting duty that falls to my wife by ensuring the fridge is full of leftovers, preferably ones our little one will eat (good thing she loves risotto too), the laundry basket is nearly empty, and no bills are left waiting to be paid. I hope that helps, but I always think there’s some chore I’m forgetting–just like I always think there’s something I’ve forgotten to pack.

The trade-off of travel

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I’m in the middle of an unprecedented amount of travel. Two weeks ago, I flew out to L.A. to give a talk at an Edmunds.com conference; tonight, I’m flying to Berlin to cover the IFA consumer-electronics show there; two Sundays from now, I’m off to San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt; a week and a half after that, the Online News Association’s annual conference takes place in the same city; one week later, the Demo conference happens in Santa Clara.

I feel tired just reading the preceding sentence. In a normal month, I might have one trip out of town, certainly none requiring my passport.

I have business reasons for all this flying back and forth. I’ve never gone to some of these events before and would like to learn what I’ve missed; I expect to see interesting products debuted and demoed at them; they should represent good networking opportunities for me; at least for this year, I can afford the expense.

(The IFA trip is largely subsidized: The organizers have a pot of money set aside to bring some U.S. journalists there, with no requirement that I can discern to cover a particular vendor or technology. My regular editors were okay with that.)

But I have seriously mixed emotions every time I start to pack.

I hate the part of travel where I have to tear myself away from my lovely wife and our bubbly two-year-old. That dread often sets in not one but two nights before a departure, and it hasn’t gotten that much easier since my first business trip as a dad.

But I like travel itself–seeing the ground fall away from the wing at takeoff and then draw near again as we settle onto the runway, then finding my way around some new part of the world–and that allows the gloom to lift once I reach the airport. (Especially if it’s my beloved National Airport instead of, say, United’s grim C/D concourse at Dulles.)

The other part of traveling as a parent is the spouse debt I run up every time my lovely wife has to care for our bubbly two-year-old solo–something I have done for all of maybe four nights myself. I try to even the balance by setting aside a few nights’ worth of dinner in the fridge and freezer before I head out, but I know I couldn’t do this without the support of my family. And I know how fantastic it will be to come home to them this Sunday afternoon.