Houston to Hartford

We had a hectic morning, packing, cleaning, talking with the petsitters and trying to spend a few minutes with the livestock, who appeared surprisingly clueless that anything was amiss. The bunny was unusually affectionate, giving me major guilt complexes before my luggage was even out the door.

Dad arrived on schedule to take us to the airport, and after saying good-bye to the critters, we were off. Dad brought Mom's sedan, since he drives a pickup and rain had been incorrectly predicted by our friends at weather.com. Instead, the sun was shining, and I quickly came to wish we were in the truck because the car jerked and misfired in a way that made me wonder if we were going to end up broken down on the side of I-45. After a nerve-wracking half hour, though, we arrived safely at Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Much to our amusement, we ran into one of our university professors at the Continental Airlines check-in. Dr. Zaretsky was heading to Florida, while we were off to Connecticut, but it still seemed like a pretty small world.

Check-in and the first leg of our flight were pretty uneventful. We departed Houston and arrived in Cleveland on time, with plenty of time to change terminals and find the gate for our flight to Hartford. Cleveland's airport is pretty small, but right by our gate was the most amazing long flight of stairs. Since I had some time on my hands and running shoes in my carry-on, I decided to get a little exercise and spent about fifteen minutes running up and down the stairs, no doubt convincing my husband and several innocent bystanders that I’m completely insane.

We got to Hartford on time, and our bags were among the first off the plane. Luckily the hotel was just down the hall, so off we went http://www.sheratonbradley.com/. Since it was already about 9:00 pm by this point, we had to decide quickly whether to dress for dinner and go to the dining room, or go work out in the gym and order room service. They gym won out. The gym was so cute and small that I wished I could take it home with me. I bypassed it though, and did some laps in the pool, which was freezing cold! After that, I was ready for some quality time in the sauna, to thaw out a bit. Then we went back to our room and had dinner sent up, finishing the evening by watching planes out our window.