Travel Stories Vol. 1 - Planes

News update first - the floor went in fine, it looks great. Bootsy went down peacefully, and Kiley has adjusted. Macy can swim. Madeleine can walk. Everyone is moving on....

Now to a lighter subject...one of the original reasons I started this whole mess was to document stuff that happens to me as I'm either walking around in public, or when strange stuff happens. And the need for something like this pretty much started back in December...1998, if I'm piecing this together right (would have been nice to have this written down).

I was living in San Francisco at the time with Becky, Anna and Fu. Anna and Fu were in the midst of moving out, and Becky & I had been living together for a few months. Becky & I both went back to NJ together where I proposed to her in my old bedroom at my mom's house, and she accepted. She then flew back to SF and I stayed behind to spend a couple more days with my folks.

I was on the United Airlines night flight back from Newark to SFO when around 11:00 PM, about 45 minutes from touchdown, the pilot announced that due to foggy conditions in Oakland, SF and San Jose (and "stacked" conditions in Sacramento) that we were being turned back to Denver airport. On a Sunday, something like December 27th. Holiday season. Overbooking Central. Getting out of here was going to be near impossible. I was only half awake and swore I was dreaming it, it was just too surreal. Just to put it in full perspective, the flight had already been delayed taking off from Newark by about 2 hours, this was just insult to injury already.

After the plane drops us in Denver, pissed off and grumbling, there's really not much communication on the other end as to what happens next. I started off for the rental car counter, hoping to get a car to drive from Denver to SF. They pretty much laughed at that, so that was out. Had to take a 30-minute round trip shuttle ride just to figure that out too.

As it turns out, ours was not the only plane to get re-routed, apparently several others did as well, dumping what was said to be an extra 1000-2000 people inside Denver Int'l Airport. With all those extra bodies, I really had to wait to stake out a phone booth for use as a base of operations...got on the line with United, was on hold for literally 30-40 minutes, and finally got through to an agent who put me on a flight for SF leaving at 1 PM the next day.

Now I had about 12 hours to kill. After some searching I finally found a bench to pass out on and managed to go to sleep for a couple hours. Keep in mind my baggage is still on the plane (which they inexplicably allowed to continue on through to SFO....?!!!), and I am left with nothing but my carry-on in which I only had a few books and papers. Nothing for my contact lenses, no deodorant, no toothbrush, nada. I get some breakfast at Burger King or something like that and then head to the gate where my flight is going to be.

Here's the next wrinkle....around 12:45 PM I notice that no mention of the flight I'm supposed to be on has been made on or around the gate. The sign above the gate still reads for a flight that has already left, and looking at the screens I can't find the flight in the listings. So I walk up to the flight attendant at the gate desk, just about the same time as someone else apparently with the same set of problems, just in time to hear her say that flight has been cancelled due to mechanical problems. The other guy and I look at each other, speechless. He lights into her with "well, wouldn't that just be kinda IMPORTANT TO LET US KNOW...???" and I walk off to think it over on my own.

As I was walking, I saw the information booth for the airport and asked the dude behind the counter about buses. He said I was in luck, there was a Greyhound Bus terminal right there at the airport and told me where to find it. I decided to give United one last chance and waited 30 minutes on hold again, only to find that the next flight out of there was going to be on Wednesday to Oakland. This was Monday. I didn't have enough cash to stay in a hotel for two nights, and I didn't have a credit card so....Go Greyhound.

As it turns out, there is a bus to SF, and the next one leaves at 4:30 PM. Problem is, it goes to downtown Denver first (the airport is actually 45 minutes outside of town), then Las Vegas, then Fresno, THEN downtown San Francisco. Total travel time : 31 hours, which means I won't get home till Tuesday around midnight. But you know what? At least I'll be moving out of this hell-hole.

Let me take a second out of the narrative here to tell you something. Traveling long distance by bus is not for the faint of heart. Generally the people who are on the bus with you are either poorer, drunker or just plain too afraid to fly. In other words, you are entering a coach full of head cases. People who are on the bus for the long haul even go so far as to get defensive about where they are sitting (even though Greyhound does not assign seats), and should you get out of your seat you'd better leave something in it else it would be taken from you. Not to mention you are going to stop at every outhouse, henhouse and cowtown that has a bus stop to pick up the next set of head cases, and occasionally you're going to get forced off the bus so they can clean it. Damn good thing too cause it STINKS in there after a while...

Anyway, I didn't know the deal with the seats and my seat got hijacked twice - the first time in Grand Junction, CO by some old dude and his kids. I was forced to take someone else's seat, and this set off a chain reaction of seat-taking and pissed off a whole bunch people who all looked at the old dude in the worst way for f**king up the seating arrangement. Odd story here - the kid who was angry that I was in his seat got off somewhere in southern Utah to go smoke pot with these two skanky-lookin chicks and ended up missing the bus, his stuff still sitting in his new location. Karma, baby.

You would have figured that would teach me a lesson, but my seat got stolen again during one of the cleaning breaks somewhere between Las Vegas and Fresno, forcing me to sit in the very rear of the bus with the Mexican contingent. Not that I minded, they were hella funny and with my rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, I managed to amaze a couple of them by laughing at a joke they cracked. They spoke English after that, I guess they figured the jig was up.

One funny story here - the bathrooms in GH buses are very small, smaller than an airport bathroom even, and on this particular bus the door handle assembly was pretty flaky. Along comes this really enormous Mexican man - we're talking so big he could only walk down the aisle sideways - who gets up to use the can and locks the door behind him. My compadres in the rear are already snickering to themselves about "la vaca mejor esta alli" ("the biggest cow is in there") ; but resort to full-on guffaws when this man spends 20 minutes in there and then becomes stuck in the bathroom, a victim of the capricious lock which leaves him powerless, able only to jiggle the handle continuously in a vain attempt to free himself. After about 10-15 minutes of this guy desperately trying to get out and several attempts by passengers near the door to open it from the outside, the question starts to float around - should we tell the driver, get him to stop and get the guy out? For whatever reason, that idea goes over like a lead pinata, so the guy is in there until the lock decides to let him out. I'll never forget there was this one Mexican girl, about 19 or so, who was sitting near the door trying to give the outside handle one last shot by jiggling it while the man inside (no doubt choking on his own fumes) worked it from the other side. Her brother, who was sitting on the other side of the door, said "Stop eet...yor gee-ving heem hope....", and the back three rows (myself included) didn't stop laughing until the man managed to finally burst out of the door, the lock apparently having grown tired of imprisoning him.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, I didn't really sleep much except for one stretch between Denver and Las Vegas. But I got to see what central California around Fresno and Bakersfield looks like, and....man. Lemme tell ya. I can't believe it's the same state. I've seen northern CA all the way up to Mendocino, southern CA around LA/Beverly Hills/Santa Monica, and some of central CA from SF down to Carmel (where Becky & I got married). If you never saw anything but those three spots, you'd assume that CA was a fairly hegemonous collection of affluent suburban areas interspersed with some semi-rural sprawl and one or two major cities where the poorer contingents lived. But even if you managed to traverse the entire Pacific Coast Highway, you just don't understand that from San Jose on south used to belong to Mexico not more than 100 years or more ago...and some of it looks like it still does. We're talking towns after towns of migrant farm workers that look like they were built solely out of MDF and spray paint...often the only distinguishing feature about these places was the GH bus stop that got people the hell out of town.

31 hours later, I was happy to finally make it to SF, tired as hell and smelling like a landfill. When I got home, the airlines had called to say my bags were at SFO. I got Becky to drive me there so I could get my glasses and stuff, and finally get a change of clothes and a shower in peace.

There. I finally got to write that all down. I guess this thing is useful after all.