Luv Is Everywhere Today

It's been a while since I took a hop on Southwest Airlines. By hop I mean a quick trip to a nearby city - no check-in baggage, no kids. I hopped over to San Antonio on Monday for a tour of Toyota's Tundra truck plant. More on that later but it was way cool seeing the processes of how those monsters are put together.

I came back this afternoon and noticed a few new things from our Texas-based airline. Here's something that I've been anxious to see at airports for years. A "power station" to plug in portable gadgets while waiting at the gate. Most of the Southwest gates at the SA airport had these stands. Notice I'm topping up my iPhone. Ironically (and gratefully) there is no charge to charge your gear (that means FREE for you peeps who don't get my humor).

So I land at Hobby right on time at 4:40pm and get off the plane to fanfare, hysteria, TV cameras and a horde of photographers. Nothing out of the unusual for me until I realize this wasn't for me this time.

The Storm Troopers, Darth Vader and R2-D2 gave it away that something unusual was happening. I had walked right into a press conference for a lightsaber. When the space shuttle Discovery launches the STS-120 crew in October, the force will be with them.

George Lucas is loaning Luke Skywalker's original Jedi weapon to NASA and it arrived today via a Southwest Airlines plane from Oakland at the same time I did. So I naturally whipped out my charged iPhone and snapped some of these pics.

Wonder if Darth got an extra bag of peanuts. I could have bought him a round or 40 of cocktails with my SWA drink coupons.