Archive for August 2011
the long way home
Do you know what my new number one travel rule is? Do NOT show up late for your return flight. Let me explain how I’ve come by such wisdom.
After two great weeks in Italy Lisa and I set out at seven in the morning from a small town in the mountains for the airport in Rome. I figured that four hours would give us plenty of time, but I had not taken account the atrocious Rome traffic. We sat at a toll plaza for over a half-hour and once we paid the toll we sat some more as the ten or so lanes merged down to a paltry two. Once we got to the airport we ditched the rental car (a Fiat Panda and not an Alfa-Romeo 8C, but whatever, I’m not bitter), and hauled ass to the terminal.
The terminal our airline was at is laid out in the most illogical manner possible. The check-in counters are all at one end of terminal, but the gates are all at the opposite end. And once through the gate you take a tramline to another terminal where you actually get on the plane. We ran the entire length of the terminal only to be told at the check-in that we were shit out of luck. I won’t say it was the worst feeling I’ve ever had, but it’s the most angry I’ve been in many years. I was so visibly upset that Lisa had to tell me to calm down lest the lady who was booking us onto another flight tell us to go fuck ourselves.
Our new itinerary: a three hour wait in Rome, a nine hour flight to JFK, another three hour wait, and finally a brief flight from New York to Boston. With any luck we’d be home by midnight. We checked our luggage and hit the bar.
Somehow we survived both the interminable delay and the interminable flight. We collected our luggage and headed to the desk to ask where to go to get our connecting flight. We gave the guy our flight number and he said, “Oh, that flight’s been canceled.”
You know how in cartoons when something traumatic happens a character will develop a network of cracks and then a butterfly or something will land on him and then he collapses into a pile of rubble? That’s exactly how I felt.
All remaining flights to Boston had been canceled due to weather, so while a nice lady switched our tickets to the first flight Wednesday morning Lisa formulated an alternate plan. I was so mentally burned-out by this time that I was totally useless. After a few brief discussions with the skycaps Lisa led us off to a tramline that would take us to the Howard Beach station where we would hop on the A train. Eventually we wrestled our increasingly heavy luggage up the stairs and through the turnstiles at the Canal Street station in lower Manhattan.
It was now around nine at night and we were trudging toward our last hope: the Fung Wah bus. Just before we got on the subway my phone had just enough juice to confirm that there was a ten o’clock bus and we had set out hoping that it wasn’t sold out. Struggling along Canal Street we found a cop who confirmed that the station was a 15 minute walk away, and let me tell ya: that was the longest 15 minutes of my life. Plunking down the money for those tickets was the best feeling I’d had all day.
We actually had about a half-hour to kill so Lisa went around the corner and came back with a big soda and a box of Popeye’s fried chicken. We sat on folding chairs on the sidewalk and ate while a mother and daughter screamed at each other about missing a train. It was that kind of day.
The bus pulled into South Station just a few minutes before 2 AM this morning, a mere 25 hours after we started our return trip. I’m not even going to mention the fact that our taxi driver almost got us killed on the ride home because in light of all the other fucked-up shit that happened it barely registers as notable.
Oh yeah, I was back at work this morning at 8:30.
The one bright spot in the whole fiasco came while we were waiting for our luggage at JFK. At our gate in Rome I’d noticed an aging rocker-type with floppy grey hair and a guitar slung over his shoulder. I casually pointed him out to Lisa and told her that it had to be Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. At the carousel in New York Lisa borrowed a pen from somewhere and asked him if he would sign the Sonic Youth bio that I’d brought with me. Which he graciously did.
