Frequent Flier: Travel Is Great, but There’s No Place Like Home

That’s why I can’t complain about business travel, although it’s not as exciting as when I was younger and working as a corporate lawyer. Back then, I thought business travel was glamorous. Now, I’d much rather be at home with my family.

But I still do feel a lot of pleasure when I see new places and meet new people. Plus, I still like getting out of the office. For a few hours, I’m not an executive coach, a wife or a mother. I’m just a traveler.

I’m the queen of last minute, especially when I’m traveling alone for business. I like getting to the airport with minimal time between check-in and takeoff. Once I’m through security, I stop at bookstores to load up on water, pick up the tabloids and see if there are any interesting new books. Then I’ll stop and get something to eat.

My routine usually works. I missed a flight only once, and it was ridiculous. I was coming back to New York City from a meeting in London. We had just moved back to New York from London, and I was really looking forward to seeing my family.

To take advantage of those all-business-class flights between New York and London, I was flying out of Gatwick. I was just a few minutes out from the airport when I realized I had left my passport in the hotel safe. My driver couldn’t turn back because there wasn’t enough time, but the hotel did send another driver with my passport.

I begged the airline to hold the flight for a few minutes until the driver arrived. Of course, that didn’t happen, although the representatives were quite nice about it. The driver showed up with my passport about five minutes after my flight took off. He took me back to the hotel, and I left the next day. I was upset about not being able to see my children for another day. But, to be honest, I don’t think they noticed.

Most of my flights are routine, but as we’re coming up on the 12th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, I’ll always remember the trip I was supposed to take that day.

I was originally scheduled to return to London on Sept. 11. I was living in London at the time, and was attending a conference in Uruguay, so I was supposed to fly out of Montevideo, and then go to Argentina, and from there to New York City and then London. But by the sixth day at this conference, I just wanted to get back to London, so I rebooked the exact itinerary for one day earlier, Sept. 10.

The afternoon of Sept. 11, I was at my desk in London at the technology start-up where I was working as legal counsel. That’s when I heard about the attack.

I was stunned and felt very alone. I kept thinking I could have been in New York. And to be honest, I really wanted to be there. I wanted to be back on American soil. I wanted to support my city.

I know it might sound a little emotional, but since then, every time I fly back to New York from an overseas trip and an airport person greets me with “Welcome home,” I get a little choked up.

I think it’s important to remember that coming home really can be the most wonderful thing in the world.

By Karen Elizaga, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com

Alamogordo Journal: Hunting for an E.T. Castoff in a Most Terrestrial Place

You load the cartridges into trucks and bury them in the New Mexico desert.

Atari did just that almost 30 years ago, or so the story goes. The truth lies beneath packed dirt and poured concrete in a sleeping landfill by the railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s here, where this city of about 32,000, home to an Air Force base and the state’s Museum of Space History, dumped its garbage many years ago.

A spray-painted sign, bright orange against a white background, warns visitors: “Keep Out.”

The place may be the final resting place for the video game E.T., recalled by some as one of the worst video games ever made.

Snopes.com, the Web authority on rumors, hoaxes and urban myths, ruled the burial of the E.T. cartridges a legend, though there are enough stories circulating online to cast doubt and feed the mystery. Here — in plastic cases, shoe boxes and tattered paper bags stored in closets and garages — there is enough proof to be found that at least some E.T. games were buried in the landfill.

“It’s not a myth,” Mark Esquero, 69, said in his living room one recent afternoon, brandishing a cartridge of E.T., one of more than a dozen games he scooped from a deep hole in the landfill the night after Atari dumped its loot.

The event has captured the imagination of the original joystick generation, to whom the video game experience was grounded on the enchanting possibilities of rudimentary graphic designs. (Think of characters built with Lego bricks; no curved lines.) It has inspired music videos and an independent film based on the Web television series “The Angry Video Game Nerd,” whose main character, traumatized by the E.T. game, sets out to debunk the legend of the landfill, hoping to save young generations of gamers from the trauma of playing it.

“Everybody’s always fantasized about digging up those games,” James Rolfe, the filmmaker and star of the series, said in an interview. “It’s the perfect nerdy treasure hunt.”

What could be there?

“Systems, prototypes,” said Joe Lewandowski, who ran a waste-management company in Alamogordo in the 1980s and seems to know a lot more about what happened than he is willing to tell. (Atari, which filed for bankruptcy this year, has been mum over the years, and further questions to Mr. Lewandowski were met with a mix of silence and mischievous smiles.)

Readers of a certain age might remember Geraldo Rivera’s quest to uncover the secrets of Al Capone’s vaults in 1986, a live television event that spectacularly revealed nothing besides empty bottles and debris. Last month, Fuel Entertainment, a digital company in Los Angeles, acquired an exclusive permit to excavate the Alamogordo landfill over the coming six months. It is probably safe to say there is going to be more than dust to find.

“We’re 100 percent going to be digging,” assured the company’s chief executive, Mike Burns, though he cautioned that “there might be nothing” in the hole or “there might be the holy grail of video games.”

There is no definitive account of that day in September 1983 when the trucks brought the Atari haul here, just versions that seem to feed on one another, changing slightly as they travel from one online forum to the next, as in a virtual game of telephone.

One story put the number of trucks at 20. Others say there were 10 or 14. Mr. Lewandowski recalled last week that 29 trucks had left Atari’s plant in El Paso, Tex., just over the border from New Mexico, and that 9 had made it to the landfill.

“The other 20,” he said, “no one knows what happened.”

There is a lingering rumor that one of the trucks was hijacked along the way and taken to Mexico, never to be seen again.

E.T., the video game, was made in five weeks so it could hit the market in time for the 1982 Christmas shopping season. Atari was banking on cashing in on the blockbuster movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” and paid Steven Spielberg, its director and co-producer, $20 million to $25 million for the rights to the film’s name.

Nick Montfort, an associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of “Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,” said, “It seems really impossible that anyone could have made a good game in that amount of time.”

The game was a huge flop. More than half the five million cartridges made were returned.

E.T. was not Atari’s only mistake. The company made more Pac-Man cartridges than there were consoles at the time, Professor Montfort said, “like making more records than there are record players.” Besides, it lost its hegemony once competitors began making cartridges that fit its system — some of them better than Atari’s, others cheaper but just not good.

“The market got oversaturated by stuff nobody wanted,” said Andrew Reiner, executive editor of Game Informer, a monthly magazine based in Minneapolis.

City officials here see the impending excavation of the landfill as an opportunity. One commissioner, Jason Baldwin, 39, said, “Any exposure is good exposure.” Another, Jim Talbert, 64, said, “I don’t understand what the fuss is all about, but we welcome it.”

Mayor Susie A. Galea, 32, said, “If you look at Roswell,” the city 120 miles to the east where a U.F.O. is rumored to have crash-landed in 1947, “it has a theme. Alamogordo doesn’t. We’re not sure what we want to be.”

Her hope, Ms. Galea went on, is that “the dig turns us into a destination, regardless of what it is that they find in there.”

App Smart: Smartphone Tools Have Their Place in the Wild

Planning a camping trip can be complex because there are so many different things you may need to take with you. The Camping List Pro, $2 for iOS, can help. It’s a list-making and organizing app specially set up for camping, with categories from shelter to personal hygiene. You can add your own things to the list as well. It’s easy to use and attractively designed, and its preloaded lists may help you remember to pack some useful items you may have overlooked, like air pumps and Ziploc bags.

Camping Trip Planner, $1 for Android, is similar. Simpler than Camping List Pro and graphically more spartan, it may suit your tastes. A list-based interface is straightforward, though I wish for a button on the main display to add entries rather than having to tap through the menu first. The app doesn’t suggest items for you, but it does have a model list with over 200 useful camping items to jog your memory.

After you’ve planned your trip, the next step is finding a campsite. On iOS and Android, the popular Camp and RV app is packed with comprehensive information for campsites across the United States and Canada — nearly 25,000 of them, from private sites to military campgrounds.

The app is based on a map interface. You search for a campsite or simply navigate to the region you’re interested in exploring, and see what icons pop up on the map. Tapping one of the icons brings up a message with more information on that site.

From there, you can bring up an information page that includes data like a Web site URL, contact details and even photographs. The $10 price tag is high, but it is kept current by its developers and will work offline, which may be really useful if you’re on the road. You can also opt for just the Camp and Tent version or the RV version, depending on your needs, and they’re just $5 each.

If you’re planning some sightseeing walks on your trip, then Columbia’s GPS Pal, from the Columbia Sportswear Company, may become your best outdoor digital friend. Using the GPS technology in your phone, it automatically logs your trek, including elevation data, so you can see later where you went. You can also add notes, photos and video to specific GPS location tags to record something memorable. It’s on iOS and Android and is free, which is impressive. But there’s one important issue common to all GPS apps: using them will eat up your battery life. That’s something to remember if you’re planning to use them to find your way back to where you started.

Knots are always handy to know, whether or not you’re camping — I even put my old Scouts knot training to use the other day while putting up a hammock. Many apps can help you learn knots, but a great one on iOS is What Knot to Do, also from Columbia Sportswear. It’s free and no-nonsense, listing 70 knots sorted by category, including knots like hitches or “stoppers.” The app includes a short description of each knot category and what individual knots are useful for, and you can save your favorites for easy reference later.

It walks you step by step, with images, through tying each knot. But if you’re a complete novice, you may get a bit lost among all the options and knotty jargon, with phrases like “a loop on the bight” and “fair the knot.”

The Android app Knots Guide is a great alternative, with a simple interface that divides knots into categories like “fishing” or “decorative.” It’s not the best-looking app ever, and the knot-tying diagrams sometimes need close examination. But it is free.

Compass apps are useful for trekking, or even pitching your tent relative to prevailing wind directions. Commander Compass on iOS is a graphically attractive compass that also packs in an inclinometer, GPS tracker and speedometer. If its $4 price is too much for you, you might try Apple’s simpler built-in compass app instead. On Android, the Compass app from Catch.com is a rough equivalent to Commander Compass and it’s free.

When you are out in the countryside, remember to use these and other apps only when you need them. The view of the real world around you is probably far better than the one on your touch screen.

Quick Call

Crayon Physics Deluxe has long been a big hit on iOS, thanks to its clever physics-based game and cute graphics that make your on-screen crayon drawings come to life to solve puzzles. It has finally been released as an Android app on Google Play, costing $3.

With Raises in Place, No Stipends for N.Y. Judges

Chief Administrative Judge A. Gail Prudenti on Monday told New York Supreme Court justices that the $10,000 stipends paid in recent years in lieu of a pay raise will not be continued, confirming what many of the judges had already assumed.

Bucks: A Simple Place to Start: Your Net Worth

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at BAM Advisor Services. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

The world is a crazy place. We hear reports that say the economy is getting better. Next month, we hear that things don’t look so good. It feels like a tug-of-war, and we’re caught in the middle. Looking around, you may feel like the only thing you have any hope of controlling is your financial situation. So you want to make some changes and put a framework around your financial future.

But there’s so much information! Credit card statements, mortgage payments, insurance renewals, student loan bills and every other piece of financial data about your life can be overwhelming. It’s incredibly easy to throw up your hands and say, “I don’t know where to start.”

The best place to start is with your current reality. Seems obvious, right? But if it’s so obvious, then why haven’t we done it?

It can be painful. The reason you’re looking to change things is because something isn’t working. That something may be incredibly personal, like how you talk about money with your spouse. So we avoid our current reality and tell ourselves things will get better tomorrow.There are a million other things to do. We’re all busy. Thinking about what’s right and wrong with your current reality probably doesn’t make anyone’s Top Ten list.

But if you find yourself in a situation where you’re ready to make a change, the best place to start is at the beginning by creating a personal balance sheet. Your goal is to discover where you stand financially right now.

You don’t need a fancy spreadsheet or even a computer for this exercise. Just grab a blank piece of paper and a pen. Then draw a line down the middle.

On the left side, list all your assets in detail. Bank accounts, the fair market value of your home, investment portfolio. For every asset, list it and its value.

On the right side, list all your liabilities. Credit card debt, mortgage, school loans. Again, get specific and list the actual amounts of each liability.

If you don’t know, call your bank, credit card company or your adviser. In this exercise, guessing isn’t allowed, so ask the questions and get the real numbers on paper.

Then, add up all your assets and subtract all your liabilities. You now have your net worth.

What does it look like? If you’re not happy with the number you see, you have two choices that will probably involve some hard work:

Increase your assetsDecrease your liabilities

If you’re wondering why I suggest starting with something so simple, it’s because I keep crossing paths with people who don’t know how their assets compare to their liabilities. And the reality is that if you don’t know where you stand today, then how will you ever figure out where you want to be tomorrow?

So the next time you think you don’t know where to start, ask the question, “What does my current reality look like?” Once you know where you stand, then you can make an honest assessment of your options and what comes next.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 1, 2012

It is the fair market value of your home that should be listed on the asset side of the ledger. This post originally suggested putting "home equity" there, but with "mortgage" already listed on the liability side, that would lead to an incorrect result.