From: Richard Devlin
Subject: Christmas break in India
Date: January 01, 2019 12:42 p.m.
To: Brandon Devlin
(CLT): 10 min 29.68 sec
Happy New Year Dad,
Wow, you’ve already been on Mars for over a month. They say time flies when you’re having fun! Speaking of fun, here I am in India for a five-day conference followed by a week of sightseeing. Awesome! Never imagined I’d be able to do something as terrific as this before graduating. I’ve copied a few pages from my blog about the trip. Hope you’ll enjoy the read.
Starting out, we traveled by charter bus from Western to O’Hare airport. The bus driver was great and funny as hell during the whole trip. I was dictating a ‘memo to self’ as we were getting ready to head out, and he stood up with his microphone and began reciting this announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, if I may have your attention for a moment. While we are traveling today, please keep in mind that in the event of an emergency, this bus is equipped with sixteen exits (dramatically pointing toward the exits).
“The first one is the door where you got on. The next thirteen are the side windows. They are the ones labeled as exits on each side of the bus. If you pull up on the trim and push out at the bottom, they are hinged at the top and will swing open very easily. The last two are those overhead hatches in the aisle with the small red, pointed knobs. If you turn those knobs so that they are pointing either to the left or the right and push on the knob, the hatch will pop open. Now, those hatches are real easy to get to when the bus is lying on its side… I’ll try to avoid that.” Everyone cracked up. He continued, “Also, in the event of a crash over water, this bus will float… but don’t ask me how I know that.” And everyone laughed even harder. Woot!!