WN1103

I think that this may be my quickest trip in quite sometime. When the plane takes off, I will have been in Connecticut for a total of 24.5 hours, and it’s rained the whole time.

This quick traveling over the last two weeks has reminded me of a job I had about 5 years ago…..traveling around the world on someone else’s dime.

Yeah it sounds so much fun on paper, but it was rather tiring after a while.

Picture it, the late late 90’s, the Economy is strong, Bill Clinton is in the White House and things are hopping. I had a friend who owned an international courier company that delivered packages around the world. You’re probably asking, what “types” of packages were you delivering ::wink:: ::wink::

We delivered electronic parts, mainly cellphone chips. He was based out of Chicago and there were several big chip manufacturers there, but they had their assembly plants across the pond (I’ll just say Stockholm you can figure out the rest.) Well these companies were making phones so quickly that they couldn’t keep up with the demand of making the chips, so we would jump on a plane with a box of chips, fly over to Europe or Asia, drop them off and come back.

I had the opportunity to fly to Stockholm, London, Glasgow, Berlin, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of those places I flew quite often, but literally never left the airport.

It was nothing to jump on that plane, fly 10 hours over to Stockholm and then grab a connecting flight from there to London and then back to Chicago (or Atlanta since that’s where I was living at the time).

Let me give you an idea of what it was like when I flew to Singapore. I hoped a plane in Chicago and flew to LA (4 hours) where I caught an overseas flight to Hong Kong (15 hours) where I got a connecting flight to Singapore (4 hours) ((we’re up to 23 hours by now).

I dropped off my box and had three hours in the airport until I flew back to Hong Kong. Got back on that plane and we were two hours into our return flight when suddenly the plane turned around and went back to Singapore because a Typhoon hit Hong Kong and they shut down the airport.

I spent the night in Singapore (which was strange in it’s own right) and got back to Hong Kong the next afternoon. What they didn’t tell us was that there were no planes to take us out of there so we sat in the airport for 14 hours.

Finally we got on a flight to San Francisco (17 hours) where I just missed the flight going back to Chicago, so I got to spend the night in San Fran.

The next morning I caught the first flight at 7:00 am and made it back to Chicago around 3:00 that afternoon. I grabbed a cab back into the city and in the process of getting out of the cab I dropped my wallet on the street and didn’t know it….not until I woke up the next day and realized it was gone.

That was my last trip.