Ohio Trip—Day 3: flying home Monday, May 19, 2008

[above] A dozen planes queue up on the tarmac at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) May 11, waiting for their turn on the runway. I think there were five or six more in front of my plane when I took this photo.

I've decided that I really don't like flying through Philadelphia. While it wasn't as bad as my first experience with that airport, the second go-around could hardly be described as a pleasure. (According to Flightstats.com, the two flights that I took out of Philadelphia—US 1156 and US 3915—have among the worst records for being on time: both 0.1 on a scale of 0-5.)

After a brief night's sleep in West Chester, Ohio, I headed back to Oxford only to realize that I'd left two of my three camera batteries in the chargers back at the hotel. Since it was 45 minutes to get back there, and not between Oxford and Columbus, I had them ship the batteries back to me in Portland. For the shoot, I used my spare battery and another photographer's spare. That was the extent of the excitement for that job.

From there, I made the two-hour drive back to Columbus for my plane home. As before the plane into PHL was on time (or pretty close), but my next plane was delayed. We boarded pretty much on time, but then sat on the taxiway for close to an hour before taking off.

For the next six hours, I had two views to choose from.

I got home around 11:30 and went straight to bed to get some rest before my next early morning call time.