Getting to the Olympics is half the battle

9:03 AM Sunday morning, August 3:

I’m been sitting in the lovely Newark, N.J. airport for nearly two hours now, waiting for my 12:10 pm flight to Beijing.

If that sounds bad, don’t fret. It could have been much worse.

On a whim last week I signed up with Continental Airlines to receive e-mail alerts in case there were any problems with my flights from Washington Dulles to Newark then on to Beijing.

Never underestimate the power of a whim.

At 9:31 pm Saturday night Continental e-mailed me saying that my 7 AM flight Sunday from Washington Dulles airport to Newark had been cancelled, and that I had been booked on a flight from Dulles to Newark to Beijing on Monday. The e-mail didn’t say whether the flight to Beijing had been cancelled. It just said they had moved me from the Sunday flight to Monday.

Continental never called me. If I hadn’t checked my e-mail Saturday night, I would have driven to Dulles Sunday morning and been stuck. That seemed a tad rude, so I called them. After sitting on hold for 20 minutes, the crack Continental staff told me that dozens of flights along the East Coast had been cancelled Saturday and Sunday due to bad weather. They said there were no Continental flights from Washington Sunday that could get me to Newark in time to catch the flight to Beijing. But they said I could drive to Newark, if I wanted to.

Great idea - Newark is 230 miles from my Virginia home.

I pressed. Are there any flights to Newark from Baltimore, which is about an hour away?

Oh, yes … the agent perked up. There’s one at 6 AM and another at 10:15 that will arrive less than an hour before the flight to Beijing.

The rest of the Scripps team was scheduled to arrive Monday - weather permitting, of course. I couldn’t afford to be the laggard. And I was not about to risk not making the Beijing flight – or having my luggage stranded in Newark.

So I reset my alarm clock from 5 AM to 3 AM, and my wife, Colleen, and I drove before the dawn’s early light to the Baltimore airport.

Yawn. It’s 9:35. Forgive my slow typing. This is early training for the sleep deprivation I’ll experience during the long days of the Olympics.

Besides, I’ve got a 13½-hour flight to rest on, right? Nothing can go wrong now. Unless that group of Colombian Olympic athletes over there decides to get rowdy.