Random thoughts on the first day of a trip to Callaway Gardens (Lake View and Mountain View courses) in Pine Mountain, Ga.:
There are no bounds to the idiocy of our airlines. And the Japanese Paper Kite is a very cool butterfly.
Did AirTran, Delta, American and every other airline figure that charging people to check bags only encourages people not to check them? Which causes even more people to try and jam their luggage onto planes? You know who you all are, and after listening to a gate attendant in Sarasota berate boarding customers several times, I was thinking, Yeah, you go get ’em girl!
Until she dropped this bomb: You can check your bags at the end of the jetway for free.
Great. So I could have saved $15 by dragging my bags through security and dumping them off at the plane door? (I had thought of that before, but didn’t want to go through the hassle and still get charged.) And if everyone did that, would anybody ever get through security? And why the hell would airlines charge at the ticket counter and not at the gate? (They shouldn’t charge at all, but that’s another blog.)
Because they're idiots! Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!
Thankfully, I think I avoided a stroke by getting in touch with my inner butterfly. As part of my welcome tour, I was taken throughout Callaway Gardens, which included a stop at the Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center.
Go ahead and laugh. The Butterfly Center (one of the largest in North America) is the most popular attraction of numerous popular attractions at Callaway Gardens. Close to 100 species and about 1,000 butterflies are flying around the center’s natural habitat area at any given time.
Unless you're a knucklehead, you might learn something, too. Like this common misconception: Caterpillars go into a cocoon and become butterflies. Wrong! As was pointed out to me, moths come out of cocoons. Caterpillars metamorph into chrysalis and become butterflies.
"It's like Ford Mustangs and Ford trucks," my tour guide said, weaving her own homespun analogy. "Both fly, but they're entirely different models."
At least the Japanese Paper Kite and friends know how to wing it. And they don't have any baggage.
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