Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 1 month old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Day Four: time to head back home. Another spring training vacation has come to a close. 🙁

6:45am (MST): phew, I finally made it to my gate (for a 7am flight). The Phoenix airport (the Delta terminal anyway) is a madhouse this morning.

My brother and I got up at 5:15am and were on the road to the airport by 5:30am. Wow, we put over 560 miles on the rental car in the past three days.

We had to part ways at the rental car complex since we had to take different shuttle buses to different terminals. So we said our goodbyes and boarded our buses around 5:45am. The line at the Delta counter was looong. It turned out to be not the line to check in, but the line to drop off your baggage after you checked in. So I quickly got my boarding passes at the self-service kiosk and then got in the line. There were the usual people complaining that they were going to miss their flight and eventually they pulled everyone with a 7am flight into a separate line. At about 6:25am I was finally in line at security, another long one. But it moved steadily and despite boarding for my flight starting at 6:30am they were running behind.

So even though I arrived at my gate 15 minutes prior to scheduled departure I still had time to wait around a bit before boarding. Plus I was in no hurry to board because for some reason I had a middle seat! 👿 All the way to Atlanta! Arrrgh! So much for my good karma on this trip. In fact, I was just one row away from that good luck trend continuing. The guy who had the middle seat in the row behind me ended up getting to go into first class. There was already someone sitting in his seat and it turned out that the guy who took his seat had a first class ticket but was flying with a friend who had the aisle seat in that row in coach. So he just gave his first class ticket to the other guy, wow! And that could have been me. Oh well … instead I suffered through the flight to Atlanta, mostly sleeping. Luckily the tailwind when flying east makes the flight shorter than the one heading out west.

2:00pm (EDT): we landed slightly early in Atlanta, which was good since I had a quick layover. Luckily my connecting gate was just two away from where we came in. I had just enough time to pick up a snack and then got to board through the priority lane because I had another exit row seat.

Unfortunately, I should have looked where my seat was. It was the very first row of coach, but there was no bulkhead which means my row of seats was right next to the door where everyone was walking in. My seat was the aisle, so I basically got my feet stepped on and got bumped in the shoulder by everyone’s bags as the rest of the plane boarded. Oh well, at least again I had lots of leg room during the quick flight back to Tampa.

3:45pm (EDT): I’m back home! It was another great trip. Here’s hoping the Indians have a great regular season. I’ll see you back here next year around the same time for Spring Training ’12!

Tech Recap!

The camera connection kit worked great (and fast!) for offloading the photos from my camera’s SD card to the iPad. It was nice to be able to use the iPad’s larger screen for reviewing the photos we had taken at the baseball games, Grand Canyon, etc.

I ended up actually not using Photogene to upload the photos to Dropbox like I had planned, though. What I didn’t discover in my testing before the trip is that there was no “select all” feature to mark all of the photos to upload to Dropbox. By the time Saturday evening came around I had several hundred photos on the iPad. I had to tap on each one to upload it to Dropbox. 😯 Needless to say I didn’t want to do this for all of the photos. Next, since Photogene is working with a copy of the photo and not the original, you have to specify a new filename when uploading to Dropbox and it adds a sequential counter to the end. Annoyingly, the last photo you’ve selected to upload is file #1 and it counts up as it sends the files in reverse selection order so that the first one you selected (the last one uploaded) is #x. That screws up your filename sort order on Dropbox (at least the EXIF information seemed to be untouched). Lastly, uploading to Dropbox was slooow over WiFi at the hotel (and it doesn’t run in the background) so I ended up canceling the transfer and just downloading the photos (with their original IMG_xxxx.JPG filenames as dictated by the camera) to my PC when I got home today. So, my plans for uploading all my photos during the trip to Dropbox didn’t pan out, but the camera connection kit for the iPad was a definite winner.

I also never used the Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad. My brother and I were so busy that we really only used the iPad to quickly check e-mail at the hotel each night. We never needed the speed of a full keyboard so the case never left my backpack.

Finally, despite what I had read, my iPhone worked just fine at (and in) the Grand Canyon. I always had bars, just no 3G. I did have a basic Edge data connection, though, which worked fine for sending a few photos to my colleagues at work.