I'd never been to Nebraska. Now I have...for twelve more hours!
Update: Thanks to the Lincoln chapter of Legatus for an excellent evening - a good crowd, especially notable since the chapter is only a few months old, and an engaging audience. Michael the Baby had a fabulous time at the home of my host, along with her three older children. Amazingly enough, after only a half-hour nap today (Fort Wayne-Detroit), he stayed awake all evening, which is good, since he is now passed out here in the room and will probably stay asleep until we have to get up and fly back at a time which I will not mention.
Drove past the football stadium - it's classy looking, as is the capitol building. Doesn't make up for the thirty-degree weather, snow and stiff wind though. Sorry.
Travel moments:
From Detroit to Lincoln, my seat was in the way back. I was standing there with the baby, waiting for everyone else to board, letting him stand around before his period of confinement was to begin. An enormous man came back and, with difficulty, lowered himself into a seat across the aisle from mine. A minute later, a woman came, with that look people have as they are looking for their seats - eyes darting back and forth, searching out numbers and letters. In her case, darting down to see the man, darting up, back and forth, and gamely smiling while her eyes registered obvious dismay at the space she would be alloted. She was a good person though, and immediately engaged him in conversation which I, naturally, eavesdropped on (is it eavesdropping when they're 18 inches away? I think not.) He's a well-traveled man. I don't see how large people survive on those little planes, myself.
Why do people have to take hours to mull over which skim caramel cinammon double latte they're going to have? My great joy at seeing that my gate for flight #2 was one down from the gate I came in on soon dissolved as I stood in line in the coffee beanery thing across the way, holding on (barely) to a wriggly baby who just wanted to GET DOWN with one arm, and holding a Diet Coke, banana and yogurt in the other, behind a young woman who just COULD NOT decide what coffee she wanted, a situation only made worse when it was discovered the machine was out of milk, by which time I was hanging on to the baby by his armpits and shooting death ray stares at anyone in my way. Because, you know, I was going to give a talk on Christianity and everything.
In the airport in Lincoln, a woman talkng on her cel, reporting on her trip in the flattest tones imaginable: "It was fun, It was super maximum fun." If I hadn't been in Nebraska, I would have called it an Indiana moment. Which means it must have been a Nebraska moment.
Which, I imagine, is what the baby had tonight. Super Maximum Fun!
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