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Yesterday was a 17-hour travel marathon (the third such for me in four weeks) which at last got me to San Francisco.   Looking back on the trip here, there are a few things I’ve realized.

1.  No amount of cold medication alleviates your cold symptoms in an airplane.  There’s a reason Advil doesn’t show airplane scenes in their Cold and Sinus television ads.

2.  A pomeranian in your purse does not give you the right to decide who sits where.  This seems self-evident, but was the subject of considerable argument between the flight crew and a woman from New Jersey who wanted there to be an open seat beside her for her dog.

3.  If you’re a woman from New Jersey, you need to be more aware that your accent may be unpalatable to certain of your fellow airplane passengers.

4.  If you’re a woman from New Jersey, and can only quiet your yapping toy dog by yelling her name, #2 may be invalidated.

Since some last minute meeting plans came apart in San Francisco, I’m headed back to Los Angeles half a day early. This has involved two new experiences for me: flying standby, and secondary screening. Believe it or not, the former is more intimidating to me, because it amplifies the disconnect I feel between what is happening and what I knew I could expect.

I got to San Francisco Airport roughly 14 hours early for my hour-long flight, intending to move it up as early as possible to meet Roz in Los Angeles. The woman on the phone with me last night at the airline assured me that this would be fine, and that there was lots of space on an early flight, and they would work it out for me. Obviously, though, when I asked about the same ‘wide open’ flight this morning, it had been cancelled. Nevertheless, I was issued a standby ticket, then allowed into the security checkpoint, where a very cool guy in airport security indicated that I had been selected for secondary screening by scribbling on a line of SSSSSS’s on my ticket with a pink highlighter.

The most recent story I had heard about secondary screening at an airport was from Roz, who was confronted in a private interview by US Customs about her travel plans when it was revealed that she had no fixed date of return to Canada. No one ever seems to have a story about an easy session at security, but, for the record, here’s mine:

Another cool guy in an official jacket in the screening area asked me where I was headed, looking at the pink highlighter on my ticket.

“L.A.,” I said.

“Through there, please. Close your eyes.”

What?, I thought.

I walked into a small booth which looked like a metal detector with clear plastic doors, closed my eyes suspiciously, and was showered in compressed air from all directions. Then, the doors opened, and that was it.

I was frisked by a pneumatic robot.

I looked back at the screening area before walking forward, through the plastic doors, but no one was even looking at me. The robot had evidently determined that I was not a threat.

Since I’ve never left the continent, I have certainly spent my share of time in the hotels of North America. I’m now in Atlanta, where I’ve been for about 48 hours, as of this writing, and I’m staying at the Ellis, whose four star rating is seriously conservative (owing, probably, to the fact that it doesn’t have a driveway for limosines). It’s right in the best part of downtown, has actual, wooden furniture, really good fixtures, and the sort of art gallery washroom you associate with photography studios and, well, art galleries. It’s also nearly the cheapest hotel I have ever stayed in, owing most likely to the fact that it’s in downtown Atlanta, and not in New York City.

It may also be owing to the fact that it was home to the most deadly hotel fire in America, in 1946. It was then called the Winecoff Hotel, and 119 people died because it didn’t have fire escapes. Georgia Tech student Arnold Hardy won the Pulitzer prize for his photo of a woman jumping from the burning building, and the fire triggered a national requirement that buildings have fire escapes.

While in DC this week, I stayed in the Hinckley Hilton, where President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., who was attempting to impress Jodi Foster. Immediately after the shooting, Reagan was driven by limosine to George Washington University Hospital, where it was discovered that he had a punctured lung. He went immediately to surgery, and made a full recovery. The shooting happened at the rear entrance to the hotel, which is unchanged — it still looks just the way it did in the news footage.

I didn’t know about all this when I was booking these hotels, and I fear that having written about it here will make it seem as though this is some sort of morbid vacation.