Tag Archives: air travel

My Review of My Summer, Part Two

19 Nov

from September 13, 2009

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you didn’t like my last blog I don’t expect you’ll like this one. On the other hand, if you liked my last blog you’ll like this one because I’ll very probably use the same jokes, you know, the same jokes I’ve been using for the last three years. So perhaps you may not like this one after all, as it is likely not very different from what you’ve read before. On the other hand (and I think I’m up to my third hand at this point) I’ll be writing about stuff I haven’t written about before so maybe you’ll stick around.

I do, though, start off with something I have written about before, airplane travel. You may want to skip that section and jump ahead to where I talk about the phoniest Italian food in Providence.

But if you ask me, and well you should since after all I wrote this crap, maybe you should just log off altogether and go back to your farm game or your zombie fight. It is all kind of silly.

In fact, I do something in this blog I rarely do. (Fact check? Praise Obama?) At certain points I exercise discretion. This has the twofold effect of shortening my blog (“yay,” you are undoubtedly thinking) and perhaps leaving out promising avenues of sophomoric humor. Believe me, it is very hard for me to leave a fifth grade fart joke or crude sexual euphemism out of my blog but at certain points I did it. The upside is that I get to avoid some stuff I want to avoid and I get to lean back from my keyboard, thinking “ah, how adult of me.”

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I spent ten days in San Diego this summer.

To get to San Diego you’ve got some options. You can take a train across the country, but unless you are living in 1955 no one does that anymore. You can drive across the country, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and I know I’ll be seeing the same hitchhiker asking “going my way?” every time I stop and by the time I got to Missouri I’d drive into a lake. That left me with only one other option- hot air balloon. However, the FAA refused to give me the proper clearance to fly over Nevada and I said fuck it, I’ll take a plane.

I paid an extra $40 to get a seat in the extra legroom section. I got about two extra inches, but if you’ve ever flown in a full plane for longer than 15 minutes you’ll know how much I appreciated the extra two inches.

Know what else I got for the extra $40? I got to sit next to the emergency exit, a very responsible seat. The stewardess asked all of us next to the exits if we were willing to help other passengers out of the plan in the event of an emergency. If not we could switch seats. No way was I giving up the extra legroom so I lied and said sure I’d be willing to help. In fact I was already composing my speech for CNN explaining why no one but me got off the plane before it went down.

I took the door position very seriously. When the stewardess specifically asked me if I knew how and when to open the door, I told her “you’d better tell me when not to open this door, ‘cause I am ready!”

She then very slowly and patiently told me when not to open the door.

The flight itself was very uneventful, except for one time when we hit a spell of turbulence and I grabbed for the emergency handles. The stewardess kindly asked me to let go. I was ready, dammit!

About three hours into the flight, when it was nice and quiet, I looked out the window; turned to my brother (did I mention my brother came with me? Well I’m mentioning it now.) and said “there’s a man on the wing!” He was not at all amused, probably because I say that to him every single time we fly.

I went to San Diego for a week of training where I learned that I hate training, and especially hate it when I have training with other teachers. The highlight of the training came when my group had to turn an old poem into a sketch and I had to tie up a very attractive teacher from Seattle in a bondage position. This is true. I was not at all comfortable but she had clearly done it before. “Run this rope between my breasts” she said at one point and I really wished there were not thirty other people around. I have not found them yet but pictures of this do exist. I hope they stay lost.

Along with me from my school were some other teachers who kind of went off on their own and my AP. Every single day he told us how much he wanted to take us out to dinner and every single dinner time he was nowhere to be found.

While I was there I saw the zoo, where we watched an ape piss right in front of us.

I did a lot of touristy stuff and if you want to you can check my photos on Facebook. Be on the lookout for the one where I am wearing a stupid looking hat.

The less said about San Diego the better because it was, quite frankly, fun but not funny. Good for me to experience, bad for you to read about. (That sums up everything I have ever written in a blog, bad for you to read about. Why do you do it?)

San Diego was sandwiched, sort of, by two trips of urban exploration.

Here is how wikipedia defines Urban Exploration:

Urban exploration is the examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities.  The nature of this activity presents various risks, including both physical danger and the possibility of arrest and punishment. Many, but not all, of the activities associated with urban exploration could be considered trespassing or other violations of local or regional laws.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This blog is a work of fiction. Any illegal trespassing or violation of local laws is intended as humor and is in no way an admission of guilt. And as for the photos I posted on my profile, I have no clue how they got there, who took them, or why I am even in some of them. And maybe that’s not even my profile. Wait, do you have a warrant? Get your hands off me, I know my rights!

I was caught in a rainstorm while Michelle and I explored an old abandoned mental asylum on Staten Island.

Read that back, there’s a lot to take in. I know it all sounds pretty Scooby Doo but that is what happened. (Maybe happened, wink wink.)

Let me go back to the beginning. In fact, let me go back before the beginning. I’m going all the way back to when I was a kid in grade school. Trust me, this will make sense. At least as much sense as my blogs usually make. (Be glad I have not come crazy with the punctuation. I haven’t done that in ages and I’m itching to go nuts with semi-colons. But I digress. You may remember I was using some discretion in this blog.)

Ten-year old me had a ten-year old friend named Michael. For some reason we would go to school and tell each other the most ridiculous lies about what we did the night before. I’d tell him I saw a UFO. He’d tell me he went into a haunted house. I’d tell him I saw a ghost on my fire escape. He’d tell me fought a werewolf. I once showed him some white paint splotches around my block and told him they were skeleton tracks and I followed them all the way to the cemetery. What does this show? It shows that ten-year old me was as big a jerk as 2009 me.

Zip ahead to July, 2009. Remember the rainiest day of the summer? The one where Staten Island was hit with a tornado? Streets were flooded, trees were down, some areas were blacked out? That was the day I could be found driving around the backwoods. Or as close as S.I. has to backwoods.

Michelle has done a lot of urban exploration and I always wanted to do some so this was the day we picked to go. Would I have done this with David Din? No. Would I have done this with Bonnie? No, she’s snubbing me. But I’d do it with Michelle. (Poor choice of phrase? Yes, but if you take your mind out of the gutter it is perfectly innocent.) If you are reading this and you know Michelle, no explanation is necessary. If you are reading this and you don’t know, that’s your loss. She’s great. Absolutely great.

First we went to the boat graveyard. No, let me start over.

First we went to the spooky, abandoned, Old Boat Graveyard, where rusty hulks decompose and die!

Isn’t that better? Sound spooky enough? It really wasn’t spooky, despite the gray skies and rain. The best place to see it was on the property of a construction company. Normally I avoid places where construction workers could beat me up and throw me into a river, but I had to man up and we took some pics until a guy yelled at us and we had to stop.

We drove around in the rain, guided by Michelle’s iPhone, and made a large number of wrong turns in the pouring rain until we got to the site of the abandoned mental asylum. At least Michelle said it was the site. All I saw was a fence surrounding a lot of trees. Michelle knows her stuff though, and after a quick duck through a hole in the fence we were in.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Las Vegas, Part One: Hard Travelin’ Heroes

16 Nov

from August 23, 2008

Traveling. The word conjures up images of exotic locales, far off lands, romantic getaways, or perhaps your family’s trip to see Grandma in Scranton last year. You remember, there were like fifty of you there, all cramped in two bedrooms in Grandma’s condo because she’d just die, right there on the floor, if you dared insult her by staying in a hotel. At least, she would, if only there were any room for her on the floor upon which to fall.

But in the most basic sense, traveling is simply moving from point A to point C. (Avoid point B. It is nothing but an overpriced tourist trap.)

I traveled to Las Vegas this past week. The trip there was close to five hours. It was shorter than my eight hour trip to London, but a lot longer than my old 10 minute commute to work. However, that isn’t accurate. You see, only the flight was about five hours. The actual traveling time was much more.

The flight was due to take off at about 10 am. My brother and I left the house about 7:15. You may think that was a little early but you are likely to encounter traffic on the Belt Parkway at anytime. Four in the morning, Easter Sunday? Traffic. Giants win the Super Bowl, midnight? Traffic. Belt Parkway closed to traffic? Traffic. We were going to Las Vegas because my brother had been there once before, two years ago, and they comped him a room. Right away we were ahead- a free suite at the Rio.

We got to Kennedy Airport (their motto: Hey, it happens.) and located long term parking by following the totally helpful and not at all confusing, vague, or just plain wrong, signs straight back out of the airport. “What the hell was that?” my brother asked.

This time I went back to the airport and found long term parking by stopping alongside a fence, getting out of the car, and spotting it with my own two eyes. Luckily, I got back to driving before Homeland Security wondered what I was doing peeking over a fence at the cargo end of the complex.

Long term parking was full. I think I parked a full nautical league away. It was strange, though, because as full as the lot was of cars, we didn’t see another person anywhere. Not at all. To be fair, we did see a Port Authority bus drive by, but since we were on the passenger side and didn’t look for the driver I stand by my statement- we didn’t see another person anywhere. It was very quiet and odd. Even the train to the plane was pretty quiet. In fact, the only thing that broke the silence was when I shouted “If I don’t find a fucking cart soon I’m going to drop these bags!”

I was only carrying two bags but they were heavy. The secret of air travel, which I reveal here for the first time, is to never, ever, check a bag. If it is at all possible to take everything carry-on, and even if it isn’t possible, do it. Your bags can never get lost and you will never have to wait and wait and wait at the baggage claim. You can be all smug as you jet past all those guys and beat them to the taxis. OK, your shirts will be wrinkled and your pants will be smashed flat but you’ll be out of he airport sooner, and isn’t it more important to be first than to have a smooth shirt?

I had crammed all my clothes into a duffel bag that I knew from experience would just make it in the overhead. That was on one shoulder. Hanging from the other was my laptop bag. It had my laptop, my camera, my iPod, my cell phone, assorted charges and cables, and whatever random this’s and that’s that seem to have made their way into that laptop bag and call it home. There was a CD-R with the label all smudged, some kind of USB converter that doesn’t have diddley to do with the laptop, an instruction book to a printer, and cables, cables, cables. So the bag was a bit heavy.

We found the carts and they were stuck in a machine and cost three dollars to get one loose. No, I was going to Vegas. There are about a billion and two fun and dangerous ways to lose money in Vegas, I wasn’t about to squander three bucks on a cart at JFK.

Besides, there was one sitting on the street four feet away.

We loaded the bags on the cart and soon found why it was abandoned- it had a gimpy wheel. But I didn’t care and, even with a gimpy wheel, it was better than breaking my shoulders marching across the long term no man’s land. And march it was. We were heading to the Air Tram, which was so far away I was sure it was a mirage. It was going to take us to the airport which was so far away I couldn’t even see it. We walked, no joke, almost ten minutes until we found the shuttle bus which would take us to the tram station.

It was parked right outside the tram station.

Saying a teary farewell to the cart, we shlepped our bags up the escalator and plopped down in the station. Here was we saw our first people- two teenage kids sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags.

We got on the train, which I must admit was very nice, quiet, and clean, and it took us to the terminal. Well, no, not quite. It took us across the street from the terminal. There was no cart and we trudged across the street after what seemed like an eternity waiting for the cop to stop traffic for us (what was it, the Belt Parkway?) and continued our trek.

Inside the terminal we stopped at the automated kiosk and got our tickets and went to the gate. Oh, sorry, wrong way. The gate was the other way. No? But the sign said… I think this is it. Oh, wait, there it is, back the other way. JetBlue has some perks but just getting around their terminal is not one of them.

We found the entrance to the gate and got on line for the security check. A bellowing man informed us of the following:

“You cannot bring on any liquids. Water is a liquid. If you can’t breath it and it isn’t hard then it is a liquid. Ice is a liquid. No metal. This rail is metal. My badge is metal. Your watch is metal. Metal is a solid. It is hard. It is not a liquid.”

There was more, a lot more, but I’ll stop the physics lesson here, before his discourse on gas. He walked up and down the line and bellowed it all. Twice.

We got through the checkpoint and followed more signs to our gate. HA! If only it were that easy. We followed the signs which informed us that, due to construction, we’d have to go down a rickety flight of stairs to a shuttle bus to our gate. So check me on this. Before I ever got to the plane, I’d driven to the airport, walked to the train, rode the train to the terminal, and took a bus to the gate. If I could somehow work in a ferry ride just before I got on the plane I’d have hit all the major modes of transport. I had done a whole lot of traveling before I even left New York.

We got off the bus and walked, again, with heavy bags (did I mention that I don’t check bags? I wasn’t feeling so smart at that point.) to our gate, which was the farthest away, of course. We had about 45 minutes till boarding and I was hungry. I bought an orange juice and a tuna sandwich there and it only cost me $11. I was afraid to see how much a donut would set me back. I only had a couple of hundred on me.

Well, after a while the crew came out and started setting up the desk and it looked like we were soon to board so about half of the people waiting got up and stood in a line. This is stupid in every way because they call priority seating (wheelchairs) first and start boarding from the back so most of those people weren’t getting on right away anyway. Plus they had to stand while they could have been sitting and relaxing. What was the rush to get on the plane and get into a cramped seat?

The joke was on them. After they were standing for over ten minutes, and it became obvious that the flight wasn’t taking off on time, they announced that the flight was going to be delayed an hour for routine maintenance.

An hour. For routine maintenance. No way. There had to be something seriously wrong. “Routine” maintenance doesn’t delay a plane for an hour. The announcement went on to say that this was only an estimate and no one should leave the gate because it may be sooner. About twenty people left the gate.

And just five minutes later we started boarding.

I never did find out what was wrong, but as we walked down the jetway I saw two guys on the wing. One was straddling the engine and bolting something down, the other was just standing there.

You don’t know the utter joy this gave me. Really. Invariably, no matter who I am traveling with, sometime during the flight I will look out the window and, with an expression of fear on my face and urgency in my voice, turn to my companion and say “there’s a man on the wing!” OK, it makes me laugh. But this was too perfect. I stopped dead on the jetway and turned to my brother, pointed out the window, and said “there’s a man on the wing!” He was ready to slug me when he saw that yes, there really was a man on the wing. For the first time ever! I had actually made the joke in the correct context! He stopped in mid-slug, laughed, and shoved me ahead.

We found our seats and soon a JFK miracle occurred: We took off nearly on time.

The flight was relatively uneventful. JetBlue offers 36 channels of satellite television and even more XM radio. And as you could have guessed- nothing was on. But I watched reruns of Family Guy on TBS and saw The King of Queens on UPN and watched some other stuff that I wouldn’t have bothered with had I been in my living room. The flight was smooth and I didn’t look out the window much, due to cloud cover.

Eventually, after the nineteenth hour of the five hour flight, I looked out and saw the American West spread out below me. Mesas, dunes, sprawling emptiness, and a lot of what looked like the Forbidden Zone where Taylor landed in The Planet of The Apes. I was impressed. I had never been that far west before and I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I wasn’t sitting in the window seat and this really bothered the old lady who was. But who cared? Besides her? It was The West! Just a hundred and fifty years ago cowboys drove cattle across these plains! The cavalry fought the Indians here! Clint Eastwood was Hung High there and Henry Fonda sang My Darling Clementine in a saloon while John Wayne wooed Pocahontas just below the wings of my plane. Or something sort of like that.

The Captain announced that we were beginning final descent into McCarran Airport. I looked. I craned my neck. I spilled a bottle of water on the old lady with all the craning but I didn’t see the city. All I saw were some hills ahead. Then we were over the hills and there was Vegas spread out before us.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED

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