I'm back!

but my luggage isn't.

I arrived at the Atlanta airport yesterday, after struggling through the extremely long security line, and taking the minitrain to my terminal, that my flight was cancelled. No explanation of whether it was a mechanical failure or what. A rumor went around that there had been a brief storm and that's why they cancelled the flight. Who knows?

The attendant at the gate gave me 2 choices, take the 8 p.m. flight which was 7 hours after my original flight was supposed to depart, and go standby for the 3:45 or I could take a plane to another airport. Great! right? So I chose to take the 2:15 to JFK, even though I hate JFK because it's huge and unmanageable, but it beat sitting in an airport for 2-7 hours. I asked the Continental employee if my luggage would be transferred to my new flight and she assured me that it would be done.

Wrong! When I got to JFK, guess what? My bag didn't arrive with me. When I went to file a claim, I was told my bag was somewhere in Atlanta. To say I was pissed off was an understatement. I was livid but I appeared calm. I filed my claim and then took the Super Shuttle into Manhattan where it took me 2 hours to get home.

So all told, it took me about 8 hours to get home from Atlanta to New York.

Then when I got home, I received a message from a good friend of mine that her father had passed away that afternoon, which kind of put things in perspective. Lost luggage doesn't even compare to losing a father.

For a brief moment, I was reminded of my own father's passing 6 years ago.

Sorry for the sad blog. I promise to write my impressions of the conference in the next few days.

Right now, I'm just hoping that I get home before they deliver my luggage (yes, they found it. In Newark!). I also need to prepare my submissions that I need to send out to the agents I pitched at the conference.

Thanks for reading!

EKM