Adventures in Airline Travel

I had a 7:10 flight this morning, approximately 5 hours after the terror alert was raised to orange. It was not the best flight (actually, pair of flights) I've ever had. Here are some highlights:

• No liquids, gels, lotions, pastes, creams in carry-on luggage. This would include the Purell and Body Shop almond hand cream that I forgot were in my bag. Luckily, they were warning people about this at the luggage drop-off, so I had shoved my make-up bag into my checked luggage, so only the hand cream and Purell were confiscated. I also moved my sock on 5 dpns to my checked luggage, since they're kind of scary looking.

• Security moving very, very slowly, while they confiscated Purell, Body Shop hand cream, and lots of deodorant (no, not mine, but that seemed to what was filling up the bins).

• All carry-on luggage being hand-checked again as we boarded. Yes, every last piece. We stook politely in a single-file line while this did this. This only happened on my first flight, out of San Antonio, not the second one out of Houston.

• The luggage hand-checking causing my flight to Houston to be 15 minutes late, causing me to miss, apparently by seconds, my connecting flight to St. Louis. They couldn't have waited five minutes? It's not like they didn't know where I was! And weirdly, my luggage made it. It apparently walked faster than I did.

• After finally getting on a plane (one of those Embraer that seat about 50 -- I really don't like those!), spilling half a cup of airline-supplied coffee on my lap, my iPod, and the latest issue of Vogue Knitting. Luckily, we all survivied, although the stain on my jeans was attractive.

But I made it, and Mom, my brother, and niece were all waiting for me, with my luggage, which they had found in the airport. (I have fairly distinctive luggage.) And now I'm in a small city in central Illinois (hint: state capitol) which has not one, but two nice yarn shops. It rained this morning, and it's nice and cool this evening. The high tomorrow is supposed to be 83. So I guess all that hassle was worth it to get here!