5.13.2004

The End of the World's Longest Story - Finally!

Sunday, 18 April 2004

    Breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Buffet - wonderful. Truly the best breakfast buffet I've ever seen. Brioche French toast, fresh strawberries the size of tomatoes!, waffles, Canadian bacon, pancakes, fresh raspberries (my absolute favorite food of all time), pastries, perfectly-cooked bacon, freshly-squeezed orange juice. Ungodly expensive but delicious. Ate like a pig.
     Taxi from the hotel to the airport. The drive wasn't bad, and we shared a cab with Joe of 'mojito = bush' fame. He was heading back to Toledo, Ohio via Newark, NJ. Not exactly a direct flight.
     We got to the airport in plenty of time. Checked in, got in line to drop off checked baggage. The "lines", of which there were eight?, all fed into one line at the end! My irritation level at the moment I realized that was close to 100%. Absolutely idiotic. I understand that they didn't have eight x-ray machines, but why have eight lines? Why not have one long, squirmy line that actually moved, rather than eight lines that didn't move? Yargh. Even dressed as I was, in a t-shirt and shorts, I was boiling. (I surmised that it was fever from the sunburn.)
     Despite our direct flight to Miami, on the return we were to stop in Nashville. The first leg was scheduled from 10:45 to 12:02, and it came very close to that. After Miami, the Nashville airport seemed pristine, spacious and sparsely populated. We plunked down to wait for our 2:10 flight. T was a little chilly in the A/C, wearing capris, a t-shirt and a hoodie.
     2:10 arrived, but our plane didn't. Announcement: "Due to weather in Chicago, our flight is delayed 1 hour." Crap. Bought another bottle of water and a cinnamon roll, pulled the books back out of the bags, and sat back down. T was so cold by this point that she was tempted by buy an over-priced and ugly garment from a gift shop just to stay warm.
     3:10 - we loaded. I noticed as we walked down the death-tube (walkway? corridor?) that connects the gate with the plane that it was at a markedly steep angle that I hadn't experienced before. Once we turned the last corner, it became clear; we were on the smallest goddamned plane in existence. I don't remember the model, but it was something like "Baby Whir-Whir 60", because the thing sat 60 people, and it was so small that I banged my head on the ceiling when I stepped onboard. Some of you might be either laughing or gasping right now. If you don't know how tall I am, I tower over anyone who's 5'3" or shorter. Yup, I'm 5'4" or so. And I hit the ceiling with my head! That's criminal.
     So we taxied out to the runway, whereupon the flight attendant (hereinafter F/A) brought out tiny Dixie-Cup sized cups of water and Cream Savers. Cream Savers?! What the hell?! I wasn't expecting lunch, but a Cream Saver?! It all became clear once she'd returned to her little tiny seat at the front of the aisle (there was no First Class, see, so my view of her was unobscured by the status curtain). That's when she rang the doorbell in the cockpit and the co-pilot came on the intercom to let us know that..."Weather in Chicago is delaying our takeoff by at least 40 minutes. We thought we'd get you loaded and taxi out, just in case we get a break in the weather."
     We were stuck in a tiny metal tube the size of a sardine tin and they weren't going to take off.
     Cell phones came out all around, people bitching like crazy: "Can you believe that they're just going to keep us here? This is ridiculous! Blah blah blah."
     I was annoyed and more than a little claustrophobic, but I could also see the point of not taking our little Campho-Phenique tube straight into the teeth of the wind. I was less worried about getting there on time, and more worried about getting there alive.
     We finally took off at 3:50, ten minutes after we were to have landed in Chicago. At least we took off, though. The flight wasn't bad. The landing was even relatively smooth, perhaps because we were expecting to find our teeth poking out of our foreheads given the 50+ mph gusts as we came down. Circling repeatedly over the Lake and eventually approaching from the north, via Waukegan and surrounds, was weird. But we finally arrived sometime around 5:00. It was warmer in Chicago than it had been in Miami! 85° in Chicago, around 72° in Miami. So crazy. Took the tram to the parking lot, then the bus to the parking lot, then walked to the car, which was hotter than Hell. Drove through relatively light traffic, feeling like the car was going to flip over at any moment.
     Home, lying on the couch with a cat on my lap and one in my arms, eyes closed, none of it mattered except having been there. Vacations - at least the kind that give some mental time off - are worth any trouble.
     When, and where, is my next one?

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