Today, after a brief appearance on campus to teach one class, I begin a convoluted trip to Pittsburgh to attend a conference for work. As this trip has gotten closer, I’ve looked at the details of my trip and slowly realized that I messed this up good in terms of deciding how to get to Pittsburgh and back. This post is a confession of my sins!

I’m fairly transport conscious—at least for an American. I checked Amtrak to see if there was a reasonable way to get there by train, and I’m pretty sure I also checked Greyhound to see what travel by bus would be like. I do this for any conference I attend, but I usually get the same result: American trains and buses just aren’t well developed enough to support this kind of trip. At some point, I must have also done the math on driving versus flying… or at least I hope I did—maybe that’s another sin to confess. At any rate, at some point I gave in to the inevitability of flying and worked with my employer’s travel office to get some tickets booked.