I always say I don�t care how much sleep I get the night before a flight because I like to sleep on the plane, but I inevitably struggle to wake up and then feel tired and unorganized and not excited about the trip after all.

So Tuesday night, I didn�t mind staying up until 11 p.m., and I wasn�t in a rush to go to sleep, yet I still loathed getting in the shower when the alarm went off at 5:20 a.m. But I did and gathered my things and said goodbye to Casey and walked out the door, suitcase in tow. Out on Essex Street it was drizzling softly, a misty rain that made the sidewalks wet but didn�t feel like much on my head. The rhythmic CLACK-CLACK of the wheels on the cement sidewalks filled my head, then turned to clackety clackety clackety on the bricks by St. Peter�s Prep and the small tiled plaza near the PATH station. As I walked through Jersey City, the drops grew bigger but I made it into the station before it turned to full-fledged rain. I rode an old car dubbed �City of New York,� with �WTC� illuminated along with �NWK� on the destination board. Shortly after pulling out of the Grove St. station the train emerged from beneath the ground and made its way to Journal Square, Harrison and Newark.

At Newark, I bought a train ticket on the platform, then boarded NJ Transit one stop to the new Newark Airport station. Though it was my first time there, as I passed through the turnstile I remembered reading that Continental had a check-in desk in the station and when I found it seconds later, there was no line. The attendant checked me in, then led me around to a small room where my bag was scanned and tagged. At 7:05 a.m., one hour and nine minutes after leaving Casey�s, I was on the monorail heading to Newark Airport. I breezed through security, which wasn�t that backed up, and bought a bagel and sat down near Gate 111.

An hour later, I stared out the window watching the raindrops slide down the glass. Out on the tarmac, the luggage handlers threw the bags onto the belt that carried them into the belly of the plane. Soon we were boarding, and a man and woman stood near the doorway asking random passengers to step aside for further security checks. As the first class and �those needing extra time� boarded first (and a tiny, elderly woman was the first to step aside), I knew I would also be searched. There was no reason to my prediction and it would all depend on when I got on line and then made it to the door because they were only asking people to step aside when they�d finished with someone else. But I just had a feeling. Sure enough, after the attendant took the large portion of my boarding pass, I took two steps toward the door when I heard, �Sir, would you please step over here.� While the guy went through my computer bag, the woman checked me with the metal-detecting wand and in a few minutes I was walking down the jetway.

A man was sitting in my seat, 17F, and when he and his wife checked their tickets, he was supposed to be in 17B. She had 17E and he just assumed he was sitting next to her. Either he�s rather stupid and it didn�t register when the attendant who checked them in told him the seats were separate, or he didn�t even look at the thing; OR he knew exactly what he was doing and was hoping he�d get a sympathetic passenger with seat 17F who would let him stay. And I did. As I sat down in 17B, I started mentally kicking myself: I was in the middle seat of a row on what looked like a full plane. I sat down in 17B next to a man on the aisle and as the last few passengers took their seats, it became apparent that what might just be the one open seat on the plane was 17A, the window seat next to me. I hopped over.

Flying into Tampa, it looks as if you�re going to land in a strip mall. The city skyling comes into view at the last minute, but below you are housing developments, retirement communities, golf courses, and highways inundated with strip malls. Then, when you�re maybe a couple hundred feet off the ground, an open space of grass is suddenly beneath you, and looking toward the front of the plane you see the edge of the runway and are down within a minute.

Exiting the plane was a lot different from last year, when I was hit with the smell of ointments that made the entire terminal smell like my grandfather�s house. But with only ticketed passengers allowed past security, no grandparents were there to greet their children, grandchildren and fellow snowbirds. But once I took the tram to the building where baggage claim was located, the crowds appeared. It looked like the age breakdown was 30 percent young children, 30 percent snowbirds and 30 percent children of snowbirds. I was one of maybe eight people in the airport between high school and young parent age, though the absence of the college-age kids was expected: They were either all drunk on a beach (it was 11:30 a.m.), hungover on a beach, or cursing under their collective breath back in class on some cold campus.

After surviving the baggage claim level, which looked like FAO Schwartz on December 23, I boarded the shuttle bus for InterAmerican rental agency. Nope, I�d never heard of them either, but that�s the company with which the paper�s travel agency booked my car. Soon I was pulling out of the parking lot in my red Cavalier, a bare-bones version with roll-down windows and not even a tape deck. But it had what I needed just then: Air conditioning. It was sunny and 80 in Tampa, but by the time I cruised across the Courtney Campbell causeway into Clearwater, a breeze made it more comfortable.

The Holiday Inn did not have a room ready for me, so I drove over to the Carpenter Complex and checked in with some of the people there I needed to see. I watched a little of the exhibition games going on, but they were the two higher-level teams, not those in which I was interested. So I left for lunch at Steak-n-Shake, then decided to make the half-hour drive to St. Petersburg to look for the teams I did need to see. I found Florida Power Park, down the road from domed Tropicana Field on the bay, where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were playing the Boston Red Sox, a game I listened to on the radio. But nobody there could tell me where the minor leaguers played, so I turned around and drove back to Clearwater and checked into my hotel.

That night I walked around the corner to Bukkets, a wings place and met Jeff Manto and Greg Legg, two former major leaguers who are now managers in the Phillies system. The three of us sat and talked baseball for a few hours over Coors Lights (them) and Basses (me) before returning to the hotel after 8 p.m. Manto and Legg had to be back at the field at 7 a.m. I settled in to the second half of Survivor and some more TV before falling asleep around 10:30.