Well, I am off on a two-week European tour. It’s mainly for business, but with the ubiquitous nature of the Internet and armed with my laptop in some ways it is as if I have never left.

I left RDU on Friday. I fly on American Airlines because they have a direct flight from Raleigh to London. With a strong tail wind, the trip takes about 7 hours, which is shorter overall than most of my trips to the west coast.

I got to the airport a little early because a) I like getting to the airport early, and b) I had a coupon for the Admiral’s Club. This is the “exclusive” American Airlines travel lounge that costs something like $450 a year to join, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

When I used to travel internationally for big corporations, I always flew business class. This often meant that you got free access to such lounges, and the last time I traveled from Japan I did spend some time in the really nice transit lounge at Narita.

This was nothing like that.

The Admiral’s Club at RDU is a small, claustrophobic area filled with people I pretty much wouldn’t want to associate with even in a larger area. Unlike Narita, the refreshments consisted of packs of airline pretzels and port wine cheese in a large bucket. To top it off, there was no Internet access.

C’mon. Internet access runs less than $100/month. Couple it with a cheap wireless router from Best Buy and you would have made me, at least, very happy. So I ate about 40 pretzels (something like 10 packs), and a free ginger ale and left.

So I don’t think I’m going to be dropping the bucks to join any time soon. They are promising a better, improved club at RDU when the Terminal C renovations are complete, sometime in 2008. Good luck with that.

The flight went pretty well. I was way in the back, so we were the last to get anything, but the meal wasn’t bad (some kind of chicken I believe), and my seat-mate was sufficiently small that I didn’t feel too cramped.

The in-flight movies included Mel Brooks’ The Producers, which I had heard quite a bit about, but after about the first ten minutes I couldn’t stomach any more and ended up watching Sixteen Candles. Ah, the 80s. I actually miss leg warmers. I turned it into John Hughes film festival by watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and wondering what ever happened to Mia Sara. Matthew Broderick was hamming it up on Channel 4 in The Producers so I knew what he was doing. I think Bueller was his best work.

I managed about 2 hours of napping before the “light breakfast” was served and we landed. I grabbed all of my crap (I brought gifts for people plus some stuff out of the duty free), breezed through customs and bought my train ticket to Southampton.