I'm finally back at home... ahhh... good old home with broken A/C. Those hotels are starting to look mighty nice, lol. Seriously, it's always good to be home. Now if I could only get my husband here, we'd be fantastic.

So since I have nothing to report on this last leg of the trip, I thought I would tell one of my favorite travel stories. I was in Lubbock, TX and it had to have been late winter, because it felt really nice outside. We landed late, probably about 11 and they ended up putting all the gate checked bags in with regular checked baggage. I hate waiting for baggage. Unless I'm leaving for 2 weeks, there really is no point to it (and even then, it is a stretch). Since my rep is in town, I know I don't need to get a car. I'll just catch a cab to the hotel. So, we wait and wait and wait and wait and finally get our bags. So, I head outside to catch any one of the cabs in the long line of them. I mean, surely if Madison, WI has cabs outside, so will Lubbock. Nary a cab to be found. So I walk back inside and find a yellow phone and a red phone... one to each of the two cab companies in Lubbock. I just shake my head. Right about that time, an Indian gentlemen starts asking me about cabs. So, I tell him what I know and offer to call one for him too. He says sure. So we are now waiting the 20 minutes that dispatch says it will take to get our cabs to the airport. We make small talk to pass the time and watch as all the airport employees leave and lock the doors behind them. That's not a terribly comfortable feeling. Anyway, turns out that this guy is local cardiologist and has just returned from France for a conference/vacation. That's pretty neat. He seems like an upstanding guy. Well, as time passes and our 20 minutes approach, he asks if I'll wait for him after the first cab comes. He says he's afraid to be left alone. Wait... grown man, just came from another country on his own, and is afraid to be left alone in the town he now lives in?? After I finally understood what he was saying, I told him that he could just have the first cab and I would wait. So the first cab came and he happily took it... leaving me alone, at night, in a strange place, with the doors locked behind me, while tumbleweeds passed by. Really?? Who does that? It didn't bother me at all, but I had to laugh at the irony of the whole thing. My cab came 5 minutes later, so it really wasn't a big deal. The insult to injury part was that when I got to my hotel, the only room left was a smoking room. Gotta love travelin.