Having recently spent way too many hours in airports in both New York and Indiana, I have decided that the idea of the Smart Cart, while brilliant is also pretty silly.  The brilliant part of the idea dominates my mind, because of course I would much rather not have to lug around my very heavy suitcase along with my carry-on luggage while I travel from the parking garage, to ticketing, to the food court, and wherever else is necessary to go while traveling in an airport.  The silly part about the whole thing is the twenty-five cent deposit that is required to use a smart cart.  It's not so much that I mind paying the trifle of a few dollars to use the service.  Rather, it's the fact that if you return your smart cart to a designated smart cart rack, you'll get your quarter deposit back.  I don't know about you, but after a long, weary, and expensive day of traveling, the last thing that  I'm going to worry about when I finally get to my chosen mode of transportation is searching for a smart cart rack to make sure that I get my twenty-five cent deposit back.  It's ultimately more satisfying to me to just be able to leave the cart wherever I end up and count my twenty-five cent loss later.  See what I mean?  It's just kind of a goofy idea.  I understand that by offering some kind of incentive, the airport facility is attempting to minimize the amount of person power than they need to expend on having someone running around to collect the carts, but seirously, I'd rather not even waste my time.  The smart person who I would respect quite a bit would be the young kid who comes to the airport and walks over to the parking garage and searches for the empty smart carts from dummies like me who are too lazy and/or uninterested to turn them in.  Then the kids can take the carts one and a time throughout the day and get some quarters for their candy money.  That's surely the kind of thing that I would have liked to do as a kid.  Sure, perhaps it's potentially unsafe, but it's a good way to make even just a little bit of money before you can really get a real job.  On the other hand, maybe it's not even worth it for the trouble of driving out to the airport, unless perhaps your local airport is just a mile or two from home like the one was in my town growing up.  Either way, this is yet another odd antic of mine as I waste away my time thinking and staring out the window of the shuttle bus that I was just speaking of in my last post.  I figured that I would attempt to get ahead on some posts and catch up from being gone for several days at the wedding while I have the time.  More to come tomorrow!...