Next Day: Accidental Intermediate Vacation Destination

The help roused us at 11:55, informing us that checkout was at 12:00. We ran around crazily for awhile and eventually found ourselves downstairs, checking out, with our flight to Paris departing at 5:50 PM. We had some time to kill and thought we would consider our recent questionable fortune as a surprise vacation to New York. So, what else does one do when you have all the equipment for being a huge tourist? go to the Empire State Builing! We set off down the street after getting our bearings. I plugged the address into my phone for directions, and it told us that it was about 1/10 of a mile away. So, off we go, except that the other, arguably more metropolitan and otherwise bearings-oriented members of my group swore that it was, in fact "this way".

To make a long story short, we end up at the Chrystler building. Magnificent, truly, but it sadly was without an observation deck or even admittance for those who do not have legitimate business in the building. We had walked through a large stretch of charming street vendors to get there, and we asked some locals about how to get to our destination building, but we ended up just taking the subway there, to the place marked neatly by the red dot on my phone's navigation program.

We do the building, and then go to the airport. Everything goes smoothly, and we get on a plane; one of the large, two-row affairs that have a 2-3-2 seating arrangement, and I am in the middle row between some guy and some woman.

Dr. Clive graduated with his doctoral degree in observation astronomy from Jodrell Observatory, University of Manchester in England, and, as I was to find out from the Internet later, had subsequently won numerous awards in astronomy and astrophysics from institutions worldwide, including the Mchael Penston prize. He was currently working as a millimeter-wave telescope researcher at Caltech, and it was on business that he was speaking at a variety of conferences in Paris, Munich, and at the newly opened facilities of the Large Hadron Supercollider on the Franco-Swiss border. He had been on our plane coming out of Los Angeles, and was sitting next to me.

I had at that point what was certainly the longest continuous conversation of my life. The plane took off two and a half hours late, at which point he was explaining to me about exposure subtraction of galactic contributions to the microwave band in the context of interferometry, a subject about which he happens to be the world's leading expert. We talked about hyperinflation, the Higgs boson, and basically everything. We talked for about seven of the nine hours of the flight, straight. He was depressed about the closing of the Crown City Brewery. He liked to make a little money off nine-ball now and again down at Jake's Billiards. He hated Lisa Randall and the popularization of modern science, even though it paid the bills. He smoked lots of weed. He was 32 and was a charming Brit. We talked about chicks, beer, music and theoretical physics. What a dude, right?

Anyway, we both retired to watch Even Almighty, and we soon landed in Paris, at 10:30 AM, three hours late, to conclude day 2. I wished Dr. Clive luck on his conferences, and after agreeing that the best course of action would be to further discuss matters over pool and a pint at Jake's, we bid farewell. We then found out our luggage was missing.