[Jonah didn’t realize I typed this on the way over to Athens, so you’ll get it from two perspectives. Also, I was pretty darned tired when I wrote this.]

I suppose this means that I’ve given up the prospect of sleep for tonight, or the morning. Or whatever. The macbook says that’s 0:38, which is presumably reflective of the time somewhere. My watch says 7:40am, which is what time it is in Athens. As transatlantic flights in economy class go, this one has been about as good as I could hope for. While I did manage to score a business class seat, I gave it to Dad. He’s older and he’s paying for the trip, so it only seemed fair. I haven’t dared stick my lower class head up there to see how he’s doing…

I’m pretty disappointed that we weren’t able to make it to Israel. Last time I had flight benefits, my parents were able to travel on the same priority as me, assuming they were traveling with me. It seems that this is not the case now, or if it is, none of the six Delta agents I tried to get to help me were able to make that happen. They all seemed to think that I was right, that he should be able to be on the same priority as me, but the computer says otherwise. I suspect whoever hashed the agreement for us lowly Freedom pilots to have Delta flight benefits programmed the computers correctly. It’s impossible for me to find out the actual details of these benefits any way other than using them.

Which is something I’m not likely to be able to do much more of for a long time. I’m somewhat nervous about my looming IOE schedule. According to the email I’ve exchanged with my scheduler, they shouldn’t need me until the 11th. My sim partner text messaged me that he’s been assigned a schedule that starts on the 7th. 4 days notice. Assuming I’m able to check my email daily here in Greece, I should be okay if they need me earlier and give me that much notice.

In the sequel to the “you stupid man” saga (which is only saga because Rachel pointed out what a stupid man I am. I think Jonah’s given up on it for all but the most egregious offenses), I ungallantly sat in first class on the way to ATL from COS while Jonah sat in the back. There were no seats together in the back, so sitting together wasn’t an option at all, and I’m bigger. We had a ton of time to kill at ATL, so I decided on the Chili’s Too (which I’d remembered existed upstairs in concourse A). They have overpriced Bass on tap, so it’s a logical choice when waiting out of uniform for a pleasure flight (something else I’m not likely to do much more of any time soon). As we got off the escalator, we were accosted by loud unpleasant woman who must have been in the employee of Chili’s only because scored too highly on some entrance test to get a job with the TSA. After you tell her how many are in your party (she points to an arbitrary spot on the wall and yells, “Stand there against the wall until I tell you to move!” Jonah and I looked at each other and laughed out loud, not at the absurdity of being yelled at to stand around like basic cadets, but because we suddenly remembered being issued the exact same orders in the exact same tone years before.

As we sipped our Bass, I looked up Dad’s flight on my sketchy phone-tethered internet connection. I asked Jonah if she wanted to meet him, and she said, “Yes. Yes, we should meet him with giant signs that say ‘James’—no, no…” She stopped and grinned her evil-Jonah-plan grin, “that say, ‘J. Frank Nachzen.’” I loved this only slightly-evil-Jonah-plan, so as we sipped our beer and ate our boneless buffalo wings, we fashioned signs out of the back side of some of the paper Jonah had printed out with information theoretically pertinent to our trip. Mine said, “J. FRANK” and Jonah’s said, “NACHZEN”.

We finished and Jonah decided that she didn’t want any more Chili’s food but wanted a Krystal. (Krystal’s, for those of you that are not familiar, are not very good, but have a strange pull on those who grew up with them. (Rachel, do you like Krystal’s?)) Our waitress was initially extremely attentive in exactly that way you want her to be if you were catching a quick bite before your rapidly approaching departure, but which somewhat ill-suited to our plan of killing time with beer. After growing tired of our apathy toward ordering anything else, she decided to simply ignore us. (I remarked how our waitress has the perfect combination of low blue jeans and love handles just the right size. She was short and appeared to be partially hispanic and was very cute. Todd will be chagrined to know that as is my habit, I utterly failed to pay any attention to …) [Drats. Vienna Teng has ceased her lovely whining in my ears as a result of my failure to remember to charge my Nomad last night. And there’s 1.5 hours left in the flight. I could see if Dad has electricity up there in his rock star seat, but they should be serving breakfast soon.]

Ahh, this is proving to be full of exactly the sort of boring, inane detail that belongs on a blog. I opened the laptops with thoughts of musing on the sun, but inane drivel is what you get.

After finally left Chili’s, I decided to stop at a Delta information desk to see about getting Dad listed as traveling with me so that we could be on the same priority. I won’t go into much detail, but let’s just say that instead of what I thought would be a simple, 5 minute operation, this turned into something that took an hour. As we left the information desk, I noticed that Dad’s flight was due to arrive quite early, something that’s just unheard of for ASA. I told Jonah we needed to go, and she whined about her Krystal’s. I’d honestly forgotten all about them after the mind-numbing hour dealing with a dozen different delta agents both on the phone and at the desk. I told her I wasn’t sure we could do that and still greet Dad’s plane, and she got pretty annoyed with me. Presumably because it’s my fault that no one can figure out my travel benefits. I mention it only because it’s one of the few instances in our relationship where I felt like Joanna was upset at me unfairly. Usually I can figure out why she’s upset. Anyway, we made the long hike down to Krystal where I told Jonah to get me 2 Krystals with extra mustard. She talked quietly to the incompetent woman at the register who didn’t seem to understand anything she said. So I did the ordering, at least 6 different times, and in the process managed to forget the extra mustard part. The purchased Krystal’s were so nasty, I didn’t even eat my second one. I don’t know how airport restaurants manage to produce food so much worse than their non-airport counterparts.

We made it down to Dad’s gate a few minutes after his flight was due to arrive, but it wasn’t as early as predicted by the the arrival board. Dad’s gate, C50 is deep in the heart of ASA territory—what used to be my domain. As we watched for Dad’s plane, I bored Jonah with the many ways you can tell a CRJ-200 from a CRJ-700 or CRJ-900. After his flight finally arrived we made our way to the top the escalator with our signs and waited. He smiled when he saw us and seemed to be amused by our signs while remarking on our queer sense of humor.

Due to my earlier failed shenanigans, Dad had been un-checked in (checked out?) for the flight to Israel. As we checked him in, the consequences of the bungled priority finally became clear to me. Primarily, that while Joanna and I were above all the folks traveling on buddy passes, Dad had the same priority. Since my hire date is so recent, that put him at the very bottom of the list, while Joanna and I were on top. It did not look good for all 3 of us to get seats.

We made our way to the E concourse, which is by far the nicest of Atlanta’s 5 concourses, presumably so that internationals don’t think poorly of Atlanta. I talked to the gate agent about our predicament, mostly just so he would understand that if Dad wasn’t going to get a seat, that Jonah and I wouldn’t be going either. He said he would try to fix it for us, and spent awhile with the computer, but reported that he was unable to fix the problem, and we probably wouldn’t get on, but that we should wait just in case. 20 minutes later, they called us to the counter. Seats for Jonah and I, but Dad would not be getting one. I gave up our seats and reported.

It seemed that I was in charge of the plans from then out, so I marched us back to the center of councourse to study the departure board and make sure that there wasn’t a flight going somewhere we wanted to go that night. There weren’t, so I announced that I would shell out the insane $7.95 fee for 24 hours of wifi at the Atlanta airport in order to find us a hotel room. I was astounded to find an access point called “Free Wireless – Concourse E”. I figured it was a sick joke, but it worked just fine. (So, for those of you that frequent ATL, there’s free wireless in E, but you can only get it in the middle, around the grand piano.)

I was going to start with my employee discounts, but then I realized that with it so late at night, I’d probably have good luck with Priceline. In no time, I secured us a room at a Hyatt Place for $40… After a 45 minute wait for their shuttle (despite repeated assurances of “It’s less than 10 minutes away,” from the front desk), it finally showed up. As I chucked my backpack in the back, I remarked to the driver how glad I was to finally have some air conditioning. He replied solemnly that the air conditioning in the van was broken. I tried not to wonder what sort of luck this string of events portended for the entire trip…

Things looked up after we got back to the hotel room and reformulated our plan. We went to bed after deciding on Athens.

I slept fitfully in the king bed, and at 8am realized that Jonah was going to miss the hotel breakfast if I didn’t remind her. She hates missing hotel breakfast. It turns out she hates being woken up at 8am to be told she’s going to miss hotel breakfast even more than she hates missing hotel breakfast. The conversation went something like this:

Berck: Jonah, do you want breakfast?
Jonah [picks her head up and responds excitedly, despite being asleep]: Yes!
Berck: Well, you’ve only got an hour before they stop serving it.
Jonah [as she drops her head back on the pillow]: Ugghrumph.

I formulated a plan, and dozed in and out of consciousness until I dreamed that I slept too long to implement the plan, and finally got up at 9:30am and climbed into the shower. After dressing, I announced that, “The beer we’ll have for breakfast won’t be bad, so we’ll have another for dessert.” Dad looked at me like I’m crazy. “We’re going to the pub in Decatur for breakfast.” “Seriously?” “Well, it will be lunch by the time we get there.” “We can get breakfast at the hotel.” “No chance, that ended hours ago.” “Well, there’s no easy way to get to the Decatur pub from here.” “Sure there is. MARTA!”

I happened to remember, while tossing and turning that morning, that the Brick Store Pub is right next to the Decatur Marta station and did some calculating in my head and decided that would kill most of the time we needed to kill before our 4:30pm flight. Jonah and Dad didn’t seem as excited about the plan as me, but were perfectly willing to go along with it, and certainly didn’t suggest any alternatives.

We got down to the lobby at 10:35am, only to discover that the airport van left at 10:30 for the airport and wouldn’t be back until 11:00. Given the fact that it’s a 5 minute journey, this seemed absurd. The fan rolled in at exactly 11:00. I spent a good 10 minutes arguing with the MARTA ticket dispensing machine. Initially, I was impressed that they’d finally replaced their outdated token system with something more modern. Later, I became not-so-impressed.

The fare listed is $1.75, which seems in keeping with the rest of the world. I calculated that we needed $10.50 for our journey, and noticed that the they charged a $0.50 fee for the actual ticket, which was not part of the fare. Insane, so I decided to just get one ticket to save that money. Then after getting a $10.00 ticket, I discovered that, unlike the machines in New York, the ones in Atlanta would not allow you to add an arbitrary amount of money. Furthermore, the tickets “expire” in 90 days, effectively making it impossible to ever use all the money on your ticket if you buy an amount not divisible by $1.75. I give in and decide to donate $1.25 to MARTA in order to get the last $0.50 on the card. Of course, this almost totally negated the advantage of buying one ticket, but we were still $0.25 ahead.

I used the card, walked through the gate, and handed it to Joanna. Who promptly discovered that the machine will not allow more than one person to use the same card. This is an insanely stupid restriction. The subways in the rest of the world with similar systems allow you to use cards with money on them for as many people as you want through a turnstyle by handing it back across. I’ve certainly done it several times in New York. Obviously, it won’t let you do that with an unlimited-ride card. As I was trying to figure out what was going on, I tripped the gate to open as though I was exiting, and Dad, confused, walked though thinking we’d paid for him. This incurred the immediate wrath of a MARTA employee nearby who proceeded to yell at us for quite some time. I stormed out and yelled back at her. We yelled at each for awhile, and she eventually said, “DO I LOOK LIKE I DESIGNED THE SYSTEM?” Which was a completely fair point on her part, but there wasn’t anyone else for me to yell at, so I continued until she directed me to a window with a woman inside. The woman behind the window was perfectly nice, so I didn’t yell at her. I explained the situation, and she agreed to split up the card into 3 cards for me, but it required refunding the fare I paid for but didn’t use. That required filling out an insane amount of paperwork with my name, address and telephone number among other things. I briefly considered refusing, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I had to give her another quarter to make up for the fee I was trying to avoid.

We eventually made it to the pub, had excellent ale fingers, beef burgers, and Jonah had a not-so-excellent english meat loaf thingy, which strangely claimed to be Shepherd’s pie even though it wasn’t. I asked the waitress what the best belgian beer she had was, and she responded by naming my favorite beer of all time, Rochefort 10. I decided to go ahead and get it, in spite of the many choices I’d never tried before, because it’s just so darned good. And it hasn’t been in stock at my local store in months.