My last trip to Los Angeles for USFL work didn’t finish with a bang.
Thankfully.
It did involve a three-plus hour wait at the airport while they cleared a terminal and stopped all traffic in and out…
While they checked out a “suspicious package.”
When they tell you at airports to not leave your luggage unattended – they mean it!
That is exactly what happened last Friday night.
I got to LA about 9 pm local time, so it had already turned to Saturday here in Cville and points east.
Getting off the plane and heading to the curbside, which was now getting pretty familiar after nine trips, I booked my Uber ride to the hotel.
I had made the contact and my handy phone told me it was going to be about 30 minutes for the driver to navigate the mile he had to find me.
There I stood, with a couple thousand other folks waiting for rides. There were six lines of cars, the outer ones creeping along, with the inner ones dodging in from the travel lanes to get someone, or get back in the travel lanes to get away.
And remember that I was at Terminal 3, one of the six at LAX. This same procedure was going on in five other places, which is what makes the traffic so congested, because it all comes in from the same couple roads.
I was standing there, when all of a sudden, there was not a car. Not one.
Not a bus either – the shuttles were all gone.
This was not normal, and as it turned out, not good either.
A minute later, my phone rings. It says “Uber Driver.” I didn’t even know that technology existed!
So, I answered it, knowing this could not be good.
“Jeff, this is your Uber driver. I have to cancel your ride. They have closed all roads coming into the airport. There are dozens and dozens of emergency vehicles everywhere, and they are making us turn around and drive away.”
Well, isn’t that wonderful…
I started looking for something on social media. Why not? If it’s on the internet, it has to be true – right?
Nothing.
By now, lots of folks were wondering the same thing, and searching other parts of the internet, someone found that they were evacuating Terminal 1 because they had found a “suspicious package.”
I looked at the traffic grid and it was a red-ribbon of closed roads.
So, it was wait time.
To the tune of better than three hours.
Just to finish up the first part, the “suspicious package” was eventually deemed not suspicious. I know if I left something lying around an airport and came back to find a hundred police and special ops folks around it, I wouldn’t go claim it, so I never heard if they found an owner.
And, they never gave an all-clear, but eventually, the six lanes of cars, and the shuttle buses, all re-appeared.
I called Uber back, and being smart business folks, there were drivers aplenty, even at that late hour, because they knew lots of folks were still waiting. They were also conveniently charging double the normal rate.
What I felt even worse for were the untold thousand or thousands who were stuck in traffic waiting to get into the airport to catch a flight. I later heard that many flights were greatly delayed as they waited. Lots and lots of international and long-haul flights go out late and fly overnight. I can’t imagine being on a trip to Hong Kong or Australia and being stuck on a road within sight of the terminal.
It was about 4 am Indiana time when I finally go to the hotel, and it was a quick turnaround, as I had to be at the studios in only a few hours for the first of the three games I had to work.
I treated it like a college and pro football weekend in the fall – sleep is for sissies.
The first game finished and I got a nice long nap after that.
We got the two games in on Sunday with little or no drama (they did move one game up three hours early to avoid a bad weather forecast in Memphis) and I got home on the overnight flight from Sunday night to Monday morning.
Which then turned into a real Monday, as I got an email that the hotel messed up my bill, and the Fox travel web site went down, so I couldn’t book travel for this next weekend to Alabama.
More fixes for another time.
I need to close this week by turning away from the tiny problems I have getting to and from places (which I know you love to read about) to something closer and personal.
They say deaths come in threes, and I have mine once again.
Terry Moore is a long-time friend from Indy. He died after a four-year cancer battle a couple weeks ago. Terry was a stats guy like me, and we worked hundreds of games together. We did countless games at Purdue and IU. We traded stats spots on the floor. We traveled all over the Big Ten doing games, and got to lots of other arenas. I stopped near his house on the south side of Indy and he drove south and east. He stopped in Crawfordsville and I drove north and west.
His memorial service is Sunday, and he is most pleased that I have to miss it to cover a playoff game.
John Marlowe’s funeral is Thursday. John was not a 20-year friend, but a recent sports colleague. He wrote really good columns for “The Paper” and we covered some of the same games. I managed to teach him the fine parts of stats, and we chatted nearly every day about some darn thing or another. He lost a six-month cancer fight.
Tuesday, I got word that a friend from my early days here in C’ville, Mike Wolf, had an accident in his home in Idaho and passed away. Mike was a softball and golfing friend with a really dry wit and sense of humor. His daughter is Clancy Wolf, who I was honored to feature last year about her role with the Boston Celtics. I want to pass along my condolences to her, her brother Gabe, and Mike’s family, Mike was a cancer survivor, beating both brain and prostate cancer, only to have this accident take his life.
It makes this guy just a little more thankful for the blessings of life and the good things we have.
Life can be so fleeting.
I’m heading to Birmingham this weekend for USFL playoffs (even if the Fox travel site doesn’t work). Nine weekends in California and now one in Alabama.
How’s that for a culture shock?
Safe travels.
Jeff Nelson is a frequent contributor to the Journal Review and works professionally for Fox Sports assisting with NFL broadcasts and the Indiana Pacers.
