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I flew into Cleveland on June 30th, taking an early train from Penn Station to Newark to catch a Northwest flight to Detroit and then to Cleveland. The AirTrain got to the airport early, which was a good thing, because my credit card didn’t pull up the flight on the NWA kiosk for the e-ticket. The customer service rep at the counter told me that I wasn’t on any NWA flight, which was surprising. Digging into his systems a bit deeper, he discovered I was actually on a Continental flight through code-sharing: I’d have to go to a different Newark terminal to check in. But the rep was helpful. Seeing how early it was, he put me on a NWA flight that would leave half an hour before the Continental one, and he could give me the boarding pass there.

After passing through security, in the back of my head I had a moment of irrational flight paranoia because I don’t fly a lot. I’m sure these sorts of switches from scheduled flights are pretty common place, and Road Warriors go through this a few times a year. But the fatalistic flying voice from the back of the head was telling me that this new flight would crash on the way to Detroit, and I’d be one of those victim profiles where Fortune is blamed for putting me on that flight at the last minute. Or the original one would crash, and then I’d be one of those lucky few who escape death through flight reservation glitches.

The weather was fine, and I got to Detroit in plenty of time to go down that long concourse to find the gate for my next flight, where we’d spend less than half an hour in the air before landing. But I never got on that flight. Twenty minutes before the departure time, NWA announced that boarding would be delayed because of equipment malfunction. The ground crews were looking into it: something about a generator. About an hour later, we were seated on the plane, and we continued to sit there while they worked on the repairs. I finished the most recent Stephen King short story collection (luckily, I read the deja vu short story the week before). I thumbed through the outdated SkyMall catalog. People were getting fidgety and started to leave the plane. Then the captain announced that they were still having problems, and the ETA was at least half an hour more, but there was another NWA flight leaving at this other gate in 20 minutes with room for anyone who wanted to switch. About a dozen people took up the offer, including me. I had no checked-in luggage sitting in the cargo hold (most of my clothes went during the move, so it was an easy choice. That irrational voice did pipe up again, this time noting that I hadn’t been on any of the flights I had been scheduled to go on that day. And no one would know for a while, since NWA didn’t keep much of a roster of people switching flights (they were handwriting boarding passes). But the flight was uneventful.

I think the Detroit to Cleveland leg was one of those cases were it might have been slightly faster to rent a car and drive. I finally arrived at home at around 4PM (the RTA link from the airport to Downtown worked well, though the train was a bit on the old side; Tower Terminal is only ten minutes walk to the apartment). Actually, given how early I got to Newark, it might have been faster to drive from New York.

Grace and I just relaxed and went to see Spiderman 2 that evening. Walking through Tower City, we saw that there was going to be a free concert by Cleveland Orchestra in Public Square the next day, to be capped off by fireworks. Cleveland was also having a number of other events for the holiday weekend, including a Grand Prix (a little welcome street party was held more or less just outside our building), Dragon Boat racing and the usual fireworks display after dusk on the 4th itself.

That next day was full of the usual Wal-Mart/Home Depot related errands, but we had an impromptu dinner party with a couple of her fellow residents and then headed off to see the show. We got there a little late — most of the square had been taken up by people with those portable lawn chairs — but we got seats off to the side, got a couple cans of the new Coke C2 from the Coca-Cola promotion people, and settled down to enjoy the music.

The Orchestra played a bunch of crowd favorites, including the main theme to Star Wars. The high point was the 1812 Overture, with the big booming cannon representing the defeat of Napoleon. The finale was the usual mix of American patriotic mix, Copeland and such, culminating with the fireworks shot from the Tower Terminal itself. I should have brought my camera with me: the spectacle of fireworks going off around the Tower Terminal spire, alternatively illuminating and silhouetting it, was remarkable.

My parents and my brother drove in over the weekend. There were still a few boxes and more-easily-bought-in-New York supplies in the trunk of the car, along with a couple bicycles for the Cleveland park trails when Grace and I had time later. The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing and cooking and running errands. We had dim sum and bubble tea at the Asian Plaza in Cleveland’s Midtown, a bit on the small and slightly dingy side (the restaurant and surrounding shops would have fit inside, say, Silver Palace or the Golden Unicorn in Chinatown), but sufficient: there was an Asian goods market there.

The fireworks for the 4th were shot from the Cleveland docks, with intent to be visible from the Flats. We didn’t see the show from the Flats, but instead walked closer to the docks, down West 9th past the Route 2 overpass. Here are some photos of the July 4th fireworks:

It was a nice short show, though it looked like some of the suburbs west along the lake had longer shows — you could see distant fireworks going off along the shoreline. (The pictures were taken with the Sony point-and-shoot. The camera lags severely, taking at least a second after the shutter release button is pushed to actually fire off. The best that could be done was to switch the camera to night mode and just keep hitting the button until the batteries ran out. Hey, the marginal cost for each shot was effectively nil, so getting black sky on two-thirds of the shots was perfectly fine.)

I didn’t take the plane back to New York on the 5th, but instead hitched a ride in the family car. I-80 looks the same going the other way, too.

Posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2004 at 10:00 pm and is filed under General, Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.