The trip out
My trip, thank goodness, was pretty uneventful. My schedule had me leaving on Thursday the 20th, in the afternoon, and getting into Reno late that night. When I got to Logan airport, there were about five people in line at the Northwest counter - it was so quiet it was creepy. The first flight was only about a third full and also very quiet, but I'm not complaining about that. We had an unsettling moment near the end of the flight - as we were slowly descending for our landing in Minneapolis, suddenly the engines revved back up again and we started climbing back up. Everyone's head popped up, and you could almost hear people thinking - why are we not landing - why are we going back up - talk to us!!!! About two minutes later, but two LONG minutes, the captain came on and said that air traffic control had just scheduled us a little too close behind another plane, so we were going to circle around once. So we did, and then we landed, and everything was fine; but for those few minutes it was very tense.
On the second flight, however, from Minneapolis to Reno, the only noteworthy thing that happened was that I was sitting in a window seat, and people in the two seats beside me and the three in front of me apparently had the ambition of buying and drinking every little bottle of alcohol on the plane. In a very strange way, it was less stressful than the first flight. When the worst thing that happens is that I am trapped in my seat and surrounded by drunken people, air travel is back to normal for me!
To cut the rest of the travelogue a little shorter, after being directed to the wrong place to wait for the hotel shuttle, I finally found it and was on my way to the hotel. I was chatting with the one other person on the shuttle, and she asked me if I was there for the Harley Davidson convention, Street Vibrations, and I said no, the Styx shows - as if those were the only two things going on in Reno that weekend! I told her I was meeting a couple of friends there, one from Alabama and one from Georgia. The driver piped up and asked, "Is your friend from Alabama from Mobile?" He said he was asking because earlier, he had brought in a man and his young son who were from Mobile and who were coming in for the Styx shows. He asked if I knew them, and I said it didn't ring a bell, but I probably knew someone who knew someone who knew them!
When I finally got to the hotel at about 12:30 am, Kelly (from Alabama) and Karen (from Georgia) were already there. The first thing we asked each other was, "Who the heck is Herb Dixon?" I had noticed a billboard out next to the highway, and they had noticed signs in the airport, advertising the Styx shows "with special guest Herb Dixon." We had no idea there was going to be another act of any kind. We talked and had pizza and finally went to bed about 2am. That's later than it sounds, considering we were all used to a much later time zone!