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It is the final day of the eclipse tour we joined in Nebraska.  There was a final presentation this morning (this time about the NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn and its moons).  This tour has been attended by a large number of keen amateur astronomers and has included a couple of presentations on interesting space exploratory missions - on Saturday we learned about the Curiosity Rover which landed on Mars and has been wandering around taking photographs and analysing soil samples.

We have met some very interesting, well educated, well travelled people from across the US, from Canada and from Europe on this trip.

However, at lunchtime is was time to take our leave and catch the courtesy bus to the airport for the next leg of our holiday.  Central Nebraska Regional Airport is not the busiest airport I have ever been in:  I think there were only 3 scheduled flights out today, but it is in a splendid new building only opened in the last couple of years.  A pity that American Airlines couldn't manage to leave on time:  many of us had tight connections at Dallas. We made the connection with little time to spare, but the flight then caught up with the storms passing across New York, so we were placed in a holding pattern for half an hour or so until we were allowed to land at LaGuardia.  Once we were on the ground, we then waited for over an hour for the lightning to move away before the ground staff were available, or allowed to come into the open to clear the ramps and allow our plane to come into the terminal.  It was approaching 1am before we got out of the airport and then had to search for a bus or taxi to take us to the hotel.  We were very grateful that we had booked into an airport hotel tonight, rather than trying to go straight into town.  LaGuardia Plaza gave us a lovely large, well equipped room:  very welcome at this time of night.