The official I Hate Philadelphia thread

Just to clarify, I don't actually hate BEING here. I just hate ARRIVING here. For anyone who has ever landed at PHL, you know what I mean. I just got to my room, and it is 4:32 a.m. Because of the weather, the flight arrived at 1:45 a.m., not 11:15 p.m. Nothing anybody can do about that -- and by the way, I saw the most spectacular thunderstorm just over Omaha, this thing was non-stop lightning, almost like a laser light show. FA said the pilots had just told him they had never seen anything like it before. Just about the time we were past it, it dawned on me that I should have photographed it and posted it on this blog (too late). OK, so here's why it took me almost three hours to get from the gate to my room. First, this airport is NOTORIOUS for bags taking forever to get to the carousel. The claim area was PACKED when I got there, and this was at 2 a.m. I didn't get my last bag until 3 a.m. Then I took the bus to Avis, where they had canceled my reservation because I was late and the Avis Preferred desk (it's NOT a frequent renter program, anybody can be Preferred, they just have to sign up) was closed, and so I stood in line for another 45 minutes because they only had two people at the counter. Almost every flight in here was delayed at least two hours because of the weather, but apparently it never dawned on the good folks at the local Avis facility that they might want to make adjustments for that. Finally get the car at 4 a.m. Long story short, the much-anticipated stop at Jim's Cheesesteaks has been postponed 24 hours. Staying at the Sheraton University City this time, great part of town, right across the Schuylkill River from downtown and right where Penn and Drexel bump up against each other. And hey, after tonight, the trip has nowhere to go but up. It certainly can't get any worse. ... No Dodgers news today, apparently. Had an interesting interview with Mike Lieberthal a few days ago about coming back here for the first time, and got a nice feature out of it that you can read in today's paper (or on the web site). ... Off to bed for me now. Going to try to be asleep before the sun comes up