Trying to blog on a hot summer July night in West Viriginia. The mosquitos are eating me alive and moths are flying everywhere.

I'll try to review my trip from Day 1.

The airport shuttle arrives at my friend's house in Oakland at 4:30 am. Our flight did not leave till 7 am from San Francisco, but we didn't know what to expect with all the post 9/11 security.

The ride to SFO at that time of the morning only took at half an hour so we got there at around 5 am. To my surprise, we saw people doing curbside check in, which I thought was not allowed anymore. There were very few people in line. We looked inside and the line at the American Airlines counter was 100 people deep. There was an airline person there and we asked him where we needed to go to check in. He told us we should do curbside check in. Why more people weren't doing that is a mystery to me. You have to tip the guy about a couple of dollars per bag, but it was such a small price to pay to not have to wait in that very long line.

San Francisco is one of the few airports where there are no federal screeners. After all the mishaps with the private screeners, I wasn't sure if I felt very comfortable being checked in by non-federal screeners but what can you do.

The airport security at SFO is now set up like JFK and LaGuardia. If you don't have a ticket, you can't get to the gates. The screening process wasn't too bad, except that if you have a laptop, you have to take it out of your bag. A few people were getting extra screening with the security wand but it was hard to tell why they were getting picked out of line.

After awhile, I wanted to get wanded, just to see what the full security screening was like. But when my friend got wanded in Chicago, I quickly walked away, not wanting security to know that we were together.

The flight itself was uneventful. We had a 1.5 hour layover in Chicago and had fun trying to figure out how to get from the American Airlines terminal to the United Airlines terminal.

One thing I did notice was the presence of the oh so trendy turquoise jewerly that was worn by the majority of the women at SFO. At Chicago, I saw one teenager wearing something turquoise. Don't women in Chicago and the rest of the country read fashion mags? I mean, I even had my oh so trendy turquoise bracelet on and I'm not trendy at all.

The United Airlines plane we took to West Virginia was one of those small hopper airlines, that seated less than 30 people maybe, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the flight to Charleston WVA was only an hour.

The airport at Charleston is very small and the car rental places are right where you pick up your luggage. We were going to rent a compact car but somehow the lure of a mini SUV seemed a more appropriate vehicle for driving around in the country. The car rental guy told it was only going to be $3 more a day and so we rented a Chevy Tracker, which is kind of like a low rent Toyota Rav4. The engine is good but not that powerful. My Golf would leave the Tracker in the dust in a race, but for a rental car it's great. Plus we have 4 wheel drive should we ever need it.

We arrived at around 5 pm and my friend decided that we needed to go to one of those tourist traps to eat. We stopped at this eating place with shops called Tamarack. There were signs for it everywhere on the freeway.
The menu feature a more upscale version of WVA food and even had fried green tomotoes and bacon on the menu. I settled for a barbeque pork sandwich, which my native WVA friend said wasn't very authentic since the meat wasn't shredded enough.

The restaurant is surrounded by these shops which are supposed to represent the best of WVA arts and crafts. We decided to go back there on the way back to the airport when we fly home if we needed last minute gifts. I'm kind of bummed I didn't have the fried green tomatoes but we'll end up going back I think.

The 'skeeters are eating me alive now. More tomorrow.