Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

The first leg of the trip went pretty well. Because of the holiday, BART didn't start running early enough to get me to the airport in time, so I had a relaxed cab ride to the airport, rather than multiple train transfers.

I have to say that I approve of the trend towards making electronic maps available on plane flights. It was neat to know just what I was looking down at, and it was fun to see things like Merrick Road in Wantaugh (like in the KLF song) and Atla-Hi (which appeared in a Fritz Lieber story I just read).

There was a bit of drama on my flight from SFO to JFK. Two hours into the flight, a man in the row ahead of me was unresponsive, and his wife was convinced he was having a stroke. Luckily, the woman sitting directly behind him was a nurse, and there were two more nurses and a doctor on the flight. They put him on oxygen and hooked him up to a cardiac monitor, and tried to find out from his wife if he was taking any medications. This was complicated by the fact that the wife only spoke a little English, so for a while, there were three nurses, a doctor, two flight attendants, the wife, and a woman acting as a translator clustered around the man.

After a few minutes, he was talking and walked over to the bathroom under his own power, so the consensus among the medical types was that he would be okay continuing to New York.