I am back at Kansas.
When the small aircraft landed at Kansas City International Airport on 5th January and the tyres crunched the compacted ice patches on the standing to stereophonic effects, the reports of four-foot-deep snow drifts suddenly became very real.
On arrival at the hotel, the winter wonderland scene that greeted me looked pleasing to the eye, but felt treacherous on the feet. More fresh snow has since fallen, and the snow ploughs simply cannot keep up with the pace of the precipitations.
The UK apparently is also in the grip of the white stuff. Here's the granite bridge over the garden stream having been cleared for passage.
Co-workers who have acres of land in the Kansas countryside are equipped with snow blowers and snow ploughs. The car rental manager has a snow plough because his house at Liberty, Missouri has a 100-ft long drive way so a snow blower would be as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. He demonstrated the traction control on the Toyota Avalon that is on hire to me in the car park, which by late afternoon, had metamorphized into an ice rink. A further tip from him was to be ready to smile nicely to the hotel guys to entice them to come out to clear the hard ice lodged between the car and the tyres. Life has its funnier moments.
On the journey out, Heathrow implemented new "enhanced security" measures for USA bound passengers, in response to the botched bombing by a Nigerian on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. This means all 247 passengers on the Boeing 777 had to be individually body searched at the departure gate, and every item in the hand luggage had to be examined. The laptop had to be opened in case it had been tampered with since the security screening on entering air-side. The flight was therefore 1.75 hours late leaving Heathrow. Here's a thought: do more security measures equal smarter security?
Surprisingly the domestic terminal at Chicago O'Hare has not put in place any "enhanced security measures" even though transit passengers enter it from the land-side after exiting the international terminal. However, there is now a new rule: shoes can no longer be put in the trays; they have to sit on the conveyor belt to go through security screening. Sometimes it is hard work keeping up with petty rules that mutate and multiply like cancerous cells.
As I stepped off the plane to set foot again on Kansas soil, on a cold and wet Tuesday evening, I miss home already.
