Pre-Wedding (Thursday-Friday)

The alarms went off at 3 am and we were out the door by 4, on our way to the airport. When you have to be somewhere that early you just know it’s going to be a long day. The plane took off at 6:05 and we were on our way to New Hampshire to see my cousin Ashley’s wedding. Manchester at 7:30 pm and Franconia by 9:30 which meant that we took off in darkness and pulled into my Aunt’s driveway just after dusk. Traveling isn’t my forte… at least everything was on time and went as smoothly as possible. We managed to crawl in bed by midnight after food and a little bit of visiting.

The Corgies, who are just too cute to NOT include in here somewhere!

(Sam and Dolly)

I was lucky enough to wake up before Uncle Jim hauled out his bagpipes (a little bit of background… every time we visit Jim finds some obscenely obnoxious way to wake everyone up at about 8 am. Once it was fireworks, a couple of times it’s been bagpipes and the others have been too long ago to remember… or maybe I simply blocked it out as part of a mild case of Jim-induced PTSD) AND an old trumpet he managed to scrounge from a garage sale. I still think that if he was going to play the bagpipes in the first place, he should have gone all the way and slipped into his kilt and that little purse that keeps the kilt from flying up and turning the situation into a Discovery Channel experience. He has both, so it’s only fair that if the ear piercing racket he produces has to happen, he should put a little reciprocal effort into the ordeal, eh?

My cousin Tyler made turkish coffee, Poppi and I went on an excursion to Farmway and, after getting more than a little lost on the way home, found some homemade ice cream alongside the road. Now, Poppi has a bit of a soft spot for ice cream. In Pennsylvania his freezer is stocked to rival a supermarket… just in case, you know the mood strikes and it does fairly often. We finally made it back in time to get changed for the barbeque that was more of an hors d'œuvre-y thing where people chatted for hours. Let me back up a bit, though. Jim has a collection of old cars. For the wedding, he sent out a message asking who wanted to drive one to the wedding as part of an old car parade fiasco. We picked the blue one (of course) which happened to be an old Eldorado convertible. That thing wasn’t so much a car as it was a land-boat that steered like a whale and consumed more fossil fuel than any car has a right to do. We decided to drive it to the barbeque as a sort of test run. Mom and I were in the back seat and as we set sail the wind (which wasn’t anywhere near what I’d call warm) started to swirl around the back seat turning into an icey-tornado. We thought “haha, this is ok!” We clambered out to brave the party. Between four and five hours later we finally hustle back to the car. It’s night time, dark, we can see our breath in little clouds as we scamper across the gravel parking lot. Open the door, put my hand out for balance as I prepare to wiggle behind the front seat and horror begins to spread through my brain. “Ohhh no! It’s SLIMEY!?” My face scrunched up in confusion while I tried to comprehend how my hand could have betrayed me by coming into contact with that kind of texture. Who knew that dew falls before 9? Or that when car leather gets wet it becomes a freezing slimy version of Moby Dick? All I could think about was “Haahaa, who in their right mind buys convertibles? Bwahhahaaa, I’m FREEZING!” By this time the temperature had fallen well into the low 30’s and none of us had dressed very appropriately. After a good toweling and some gritted teeth we climbed back into the car for a MUCH colder version of our earlier drive but THIS time we missed the turn back to the house. Mom and I had been crouching in the back with our heads between our knees trying to avoid the near arctic conditions so we had no idea what had happened until mom popped her head up and cried “WHERE ARE WE!? THIS ISN’T RIGHT!!” Turning that beast wasn’t easy either and the maneuver took up the entire parking lot we’d pulled into complete with a little bit of tire-squealing for maximum effect. We finally made it back and I spent the next 30 minutes shuffling around the house trying to build up some friction between my frozen feet and the carpet.

The next day, Saturday, was the wedding day. Hairs were done, dresses donned and shoo fly pie consumed.

Home Again, Home Again... Sis-boom-bah

3:00 am, Florence Italy (which is 6 pm in Brush Prairie, Washington). BEEP BEEP BEEP! Alarm time. I’m all packed except for my tooth brush and now it’s time to wake up, get dressed and catch a cab to the airport because I’m goin’ home! So I shuffle around, do my business (which includes picking at a stale piece of cake for breakfast and burning my arm on the kettle) and haul my bags with everyone else in the house, downstairs to wait for a cab. It’s POURING outside… as in biblical, torrential rains complete with lightning and thunder.

4:45 am. Cynthia and climb into a cab and rush rush rush to the airport (Ana and Taya are in a separate cab and between the time Cynthia and I pull out, and we see them in the airport 20 minutes later, they manage to lock themselves out of the building where their bags are still sitting. They push all of the buzzers, get soaked and yelled at by the other tenants, but manage to get their bags and to the airport in the end.) where we get to stand in line until check-in opens.

5:00 am. Check in opens. Our flight is canceled. Too much rain for Florentine air-traffic controllers so it looks like we’re stuck in Florence.

6:45 am. Our flight was scheduled to depart right now and we’re still standing in front of the ticket desk watching Sophie wrangle to get all eleven of us to Portland that same day.

7:30 We have tickets! We’re flying from Florence to Frankfurt, Germany to Denver, Colorado to Portland Oregon. Half of us have boarding passes for Denver, but the other half (including me) don’t, so when we get to Denver, not only do we have to pass through customs and passport control, but we’ve also got to go find out where to pick up our boarding passes… all within an hour. In the mean time, our flight doesn’t board until 9:50 so the airline has given us vouchers for breakfast so we grab a hot drink and a pastry and head to the gate. Carrie and I play gin rummy for a while, then war, then speed and finally we just build houses out of cards on the airport floor.

9:50. We board and then take off for Frankfurt.

12:00. We land in Frankfurt and then get right on a plane to Denver, a long long flight.

4:30 U.S. time. We land in Denver, Colorado. There’s snow and ice everywhere but we’re safe and head to customs to pick up our luggage. The Passport controller gives me a hard time about not knowing where Chehalis is (who DOES know where Chehalis is?! Stupid.) I get through customs (after much hurumphing about my passport picture which really doesn’t look like me) and pick up my bags (all of them made it). Elizabeth forgets her bag and I carry it through further customs after much more hurumphing because it’s not my bag, but they’re swamped with people and I look honest enough I guess so they let me through with a warning or something. But what’s a warning really gonna do if I’m going to steal the bag? Not much, but I wasn’t so it doesn’t really matter. I recheck my bags (with ten minutes to spare from when the plane is supposed to board) and pick up my boarding pass where I hear that the plane has been delayed an hour… which turns into two hours when the next person goes through the same process.
5:00. This gives us plenty of time to take the internal train to the gates (yes, Denver has an indoor train that takes you to different parts of the airport… trippy) and go through yet another security check point. We get to the gate, I call home to tell mummy that I’m going to be delayed and then we check the reader board. The time has gone up to three hours delayed and they’ve switched the gates which isn’t too big a deal because it’s right next to the one we’re at.

6:00 Check the reader board again and see that the plane has been scheduled to board at 6:30 and the gate has been changed to one across the airport. ACROSS THE AIRPORT! And Taya, Stephen and Ana have wandered away to smoke so we haul their luggage to the new gate, track them down and run to board.

7:00 We actually board the plane.

8:00 Our wings get de-iced and we taxi out to the runway.

8:15 We finally take off and have a relatively un-eventful plane ride. I pass out instantly and sit there with my mouth open, snoring for the entire ride.

9:30 We land in Portland. I feel terrible after 27 plus hours of travel and much stressing out. I’ve done something to my shoulder so I can’t really move it, but I see everyone at the gate and all of that doesn’t matter anymore. We’re home.

12:00 pm. I’m home after eating and dropping Dharyll off at his cousin’s house. My faith in the superiority of American mattresses is reaffirmed after I collapse in bed and sleep until 7.

Frau Airlines

My eighteen hour travel from Portland, Oregon to Florence, Italy involved a layover and plane transfer in Frankfurt, Germany. On the ten hour flight to get to Frankfurt beer was plentiful and the German flight attendants, or whatever the PC term for them is, pushed a cart up and down the isles selling cigars and cigarettes with massive “SMOKING KILLS” labels plastered to their fronts. You could buy them, but not smoke them while on the plane. However, you could smoke them in the terminal and just about everywhere else in the airport.

Anyway, I wobbled down the stairs, into the morning sunlight and onto a bus that took us to the actual airport from where we landed far, far down the runway. Once inside we had to get our passports stamped by a man wearing a funny hat whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to squint at you over his fabulous mustachio with suspicion. I’m sure he practiced darting his eyes in a mirror to get the effect just right. Down another set of escalators we found ourselves in line at the first security check point. It involved the usual plastic bins that you dump your bag, laptop, and jackets into so that they can be scanned and rescanned. The difference between the German way and the American way of sorting things is this: the x-ray scanners were manned by impatient, German women who looked like they would make great bus drivers, or gym teachers… all of whom have that hard, tight-lipped look to them. And above all, these women did not tolerate anything but German. At the slightest sign of confusion or hesitation they would start to scream in German and wield their pokey sticks (they weren’t quite batons or sticks… their purpose could only be to poke people in the ribs and a few of these Battle-Axes looked like they would love nothing better than to make them electrified) and any attempt to ask a question was silenced by

“You LADY, move on! You LADY, in here, everything in here!”

So I dump everything rather unceremoniously into these plastic bins, I do get to keep my shoes on, but only after I took them off and got a sharp “YOU LADY. NO, SHOES ON!” So I shuffle on through the metal detector and retrieve my bag and jacket. My laptop, however, was lucky enough to have a short balding man hovering over it making clucking noises. He spots me hovering in his peripheral, trying to decide whether I should just leave the laptop and run, or fess up and see what the big deal is. I chose the latter.

“You… you come with me.” He states with a brisk nod.

He has me scoop up the laptop and follow him into a back office (the whole time the rest of my AIFS group are huddled around at the end of the check point like deer in the headlights because it doesn’t look like I’ll ever come back. For all they or I know, I’m headed to an interrogation that involves shouting “YOU LADY!” at me and shining a light in my eyes to get me to confess to whatever it is I’ve done). There are large German Shepherds on harnesses and a man with a Hitler-stachio behind a folding table. I’m officially freaked out.

“Open it.” ‘stachio man barks.

I do, and he wips out a paper towel and gravely starts to rub it all over my computer. Very seriously he takes the towel to what looks like a photocopier and buzzs around it for a couple of minutes. Finally he consults a binder and “hmmmming” for an appropriately scary length of time, comes back and says

“Okay, you’re free to go… but just know, we are always being behind you,” clicks his heels on the linoleum and whisks away.

By this time I’ve already thrown up on the plane, I haven’t eaten for almost 12 hours (soon to be 34 hours) or slept at all. This whole incident was simply icing on my cake from traveler-hell. But on the upside, I did get a sweet German stamp for my passport (totally not as exciting as it sounds, but I’d like it to sound pretty exciting for the moment because it was the first mildly awesome part of the whole ordeal). Now I’m in my apartment in Florence, enjoying this whole “consumption of food” idea and the sounds of our apartment ghost, whom I’ve named Earnest, scuffling around in the walls.

More updates to come….