Travel always reminds me why I blog – the world is funny and we need to stop and laugh at ourselves from time to time. Things never go quite as I expect, but I always marvel at how life develops. I just attended a great conference in Atlanta (Catalyst) and am now on the plane traveling home. I had my tickets to the conference for a year and bought my airline tickets three months ago. Buying plane tickets early allows me to select seats so my wife and I can have a reasonably comfortable trip sitting next to one another. Of course, the night before I leave I try to print off my boarding passes and discover only my wife’s seat is reserved and I am bumped to the “find a seat between the snorer and the talker” category. No thank you! As a psychologist and a pastor it should be clear I don’t like people, especially ones I don’t know. Fortunately, I am able to rearrange the seats so I am reunited with my wife, albeit much further back in the plane. I don’t mind. We are together and the world is good.

The conference is awesome and we head back to the airport. It’s a little exciting because Waze and Google maps argue about the best way to get there and they both end up wrong. It isn’t their fault. Both could get us to the airport (by different routes) but Atlanta found it prudent to put the rental car return in a different county than the airport proper. No problem. Two trains, a 5k, two trips through security and a cavity search later we made it. Sure, my wife is complaining of chest pains, but we are on time for our flight. With the arrogant confidence of someone who has prepared for every contingency I march up to the kiosk to print our boarding passes and, again, I have no seat. The only option left is in the last row where the flight crew store their luggage and other passengers who waited to the last minute to plan their trip. On the up side, we got placed in the first group for loading. I guess they want us out of the way since the only one going further back than us is a mechanic to work on the engine.

To be continued…