FTV: Travelin’ Tales

 

     I am no world traveler, but ever since I graduated from high school, I have managed to visit both coasts of our fair country and a handful of places in between.  My first trip by air was a modest one.  My brother Ron had just finished his first year of teaching in downstate Chesaning and was facing induction into the U.S. Army that summer.  In June of 1971, he bought me a one way ticket on a small commuter plane from Marquette to Lansing so I could help him pack up his apartment.  In this small, twin engine airplane, I found myself sitting right behind the pilot and co-pilot so I watched and listened to what was going on during the flight.  We crossed Lake Michigan before landing in the same town we had visited the summer before to march in two Cherry Festival parades.  I happened to be looking out the left side window when I heard them talking about a small plane the Traverse City airport tower had told them was in the area.  I could clearly see it but apparently they could not.  I was just about ready to say, “Look over there and down a little,” when the pilot finally said, “Oh yeah, there it is.”  The next leg to Lansing was much less eventful.

     My one and only trip east took place in the 1990s when family friend Fern invited us to visit her in Oakton, Virginia.  Being just outside of Washington, D.C., it afforded us an opportunity to visit many historical hotspots like the U.S. Capitol, the Smithsonian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Museum, the Washington Monument, Arlington National Cemetery, The Holocaust Museum, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials.  We also toured many memorial sites at the National Mall including those dedicated to those service men and nurses who served in Vietnam and Korea and the National Cathedral.  Fern was our gracious host, taxi driver, tour guide, and local authority on all the sites we visited.  Unfortunately, the famed Ontonagon Boulder was locked up in a wing we could not visit.  The flight into and out of Reagan National Airport provided a bird’s eye view of all the famous postcard vistas one sees about our nation’s capitol. 

     We had a decade-long break before we took our next family flight for Elizabeth’s graduation from the University of Colorado in Boulder.  The new Denver Airport had only recently been completed and my first impressions were:  a) how big it was, b) how far away from both Denver and Boulder it was, and c) how fast the underground trains running between the main terminal and the outlying B and C terminals were.  At the time, I had no way of knowing how many times I would find myself passing through the Denver airport traveling back and forth to Oregon in the second decade of the new millennium.  

    Before the WOAS West Coast Bureau landed in Eugene, Oregon, it was headquartered in Los Angeles after Elizabeth had matriculated to UCLA.  Having driven to Boulder twice, we knew that when we visited L.A., flying was the better option.  When she first moved farther west, I took my last connecting flight on a turbo prop plane to Detroit before boarding a jet for L.A.  Northwest Airlines later merged with Delta and flights from Marquette to Detroit or Chicago were replaced by small regional jets operated by American and United Airlines.  It was an improvement as the jets were faster and quieter than the turbo prop planes.  Being a detail  oriented person, Elizabeth had emailed me very specific instructions of how to get to the LAX  baggage area and board the shuttle to her campus housing.  I had no apprehension about arriving at the very large Los Angeles International airport and before too long I was standing at the curb side kiosk for the blue shuttle van that would take me to campus.  It only seemed like the shuttle ride up the 405 Interstate took as long as the flight from Detroit.  L.A. is, after all, a big town!

     There were three other people on the same shared ride and they were all dropped off before me.  The driver turned and asked, “Where are you headed?” and I shared the directions off my cheat sheet:  “It is a new housing unit located between these four streets.”  “Got it,” he said and off we went.  The first twenty minutes were not unusual but the second time we passed under part of the Pauly Pavilion Arena, I realized that we were starting a second round of our ‘Tour de Campus’.  I politely asked if he knew where we were going and when he said, “I thought so,” I repeated the location again.  He turned around and said, “Oh, is that the new buildings they just finished?”  Five minutes later I was standing with my bag in the courtyard of a complex we had passed twice before.  He handed me his card and told me to give him a call when I needed to get back to the airport but it was soon deposited in the nearest trash can.

     During the ten years Elizabeth and Todd lived in L.A., I took many shared van rides back and forth to LAX.  Most were fine but a couple were a little nerve jangling as the time rolled on toward my departure time.  In one case, the driver went back and forth on a half mile stretch several times before he pulled over and pulled out a paper map.  One of the passengers asked what address he was looking for and when the driver told him, he pointed at the gated community entrance to our right.  Sure enough, that was the exact address he was searching for and had passed numerous times.  On oee of my favorite side trips we ended up picking a fare from Marina del Ray.  One of the touring members from Lindsay Tomasic’s band Trees (whom I had met at the first Porcupine Mountain Music Festival) happened to live in Marina del Ray.

     In 2012, we all flew to L.A. for Elizabeth’s graduation.  The plan was for Daniel and I to fly home, leaving my wife there so she could cat sit while the kids took a trip up the coast.  All was fine until we hit Chicago where we ate lunch before heading off to the F Concourse to catch our flight north to Hancock.  When we got to the gate, there was no flight listed on the board.  I asked the agent if the Hancock flight had been moved to another gate.  “No,” she replied looking a little surprised, “It was cancelled.  We announced it.”  I explained that we had come in a few concourses away and would not have heard it.  We set off to the United Airlines service center looking for a flight north.  “I can book you on a flight two days from now,” was the first answer we got about rebooking.  The family was in the process of closing the deal to sell mom and dad’s house and the paper signing was scheduled in two days.  After confirming Marquette’s airport was a reasonable alternative for a quicker flight, she booked us on American Airlines to Marquette but the flight was scheduled to start boarding within the hour.

     We headed off  to the new gate at a brisk pace and confirmed that we indeed had seats.  Now all we had to do was figure out the last leg home as our car would still be in Hancock when we landed in Marquette.  Luckily for us, my brother lives in Harvey just outside of Marquette and he  was home when I called.  “Hey, can you pick us up at the airport at 9:30 p.m.?” I asked.  “Sure, but why?”  “So we can borrow your car so we can get home.  I promise we will get  it back in a few days.”  I explained how we got short stopped in Chicago and he met us at Sawyer International.  Once we dropped Ron off at home, we headed the two and a half hours down the road to Ontonagon.  We had recently adopted a black cat named Mr. Mittens from OCAP and he was being tended to by our friend Bill.  Mr. M was really happy to see us when we got home and almost knocked me over with a headbutt greeting.

     On another travel front and without getting into the whole sermon, it does irritate me to no end that people insist on stuffing rolling bags in the overhead bins.  Most are the same size as the luggage I check-in for the baggage compartment.  I am more than happy to board with just the  backpack I take on the plane and haul through the airports.  My solution to this ever growing problem would be to change the current system:  charge $40 for the overhead bin for all rolling bags and $20 for the luggage compartment.  A new scam has been brought on by the airlines themselves;  they announce at the gate that, “We need X number of bags tagged because we only have room in the overhead bins for ‘X’ number of rolling bags’.  Tagged bags can be left on the raceway and will be delivered to your stop at no charge.”  When I picked up my bag at Eugene on the last trip (explanation will follow), the man ahead of me asked the agent, “Now, if I have my bag tagged (the same size I had checked at the start of my trip), there is no charge for that, right?”  Don’t you love watching the parade of overhead bin stuffers jockeying for space and then clogging the aisle when everyone with short connections is trying to get off the plane?  I do not.

     My most recent trip to the WCB took me from Hancock to Chicago to Denver and then to Eugene.  We left Hancock in the morning and I arrived in Eugene about midnight EDT.  As we taxied to the terminal, my UA app dinged to tell me, “Your bag arrived at 3:30 p.m. (six hours ahead of me) and can be picked up from the agent at the baggage claim.”  Great…we found no agent at baggage claim and no agent at the check-in counter.  There was one more incoming flight an hour later but the odds were not good I would see a living body then either.  We headed to the WBC and planned to pick up the bag the next morning.  Yes, they are supposed to deliver late bags, but my bag wasn’t late – it was early.  Wonder if I can get on that flight the next time and arrive six hours earlier?  When I picked up my bag, I heard the guy asking about the ‘free tagging’ thing.

     If it takes an 18 hour travel day to get to Eugene, then you can guess it takes an 18 hour travel day to get back to Hancock.  The reverse trip included a 7 hour layover in Denver but only an hour and twenty minutes in Chicago.  Going out my layovers were split evenly at the big airports.  I wasn’t worried coming home because I was scheduled to land at O’Hare (ORD), disembark at gate B 4 and leave from gate F 1.  I have done this route before and knew from my previous experience that these two gates were only about 15 minutes apart.  Having made the mistake of texting, “Right on time, should easily make my departure gate,” my slightly tight turn around suddenly got very tight.  The pilot announced, “You will notice we stopped well away from the terminal.  This plane requires a specific type of gate and ours got reassigned.  We will have to sit here until about 8:00 before we can be assigned a gate.”  My new flight was supposed to board between 8:53 and 9:03.

     Ten minutes later, he announced that they had found us a gate and we would be there ‘soon’.  I have taxied around ORD many times but this time, we seemed to be taking the long route.  I could see the control tower out my window to the right but we never got any closer to the terminal for the next thirty minutes.  We passed the American Airlines repair bay and the airport Hilton, neither of which I had seen from a plane before.  At 8:15, we stopped and to my joy, I could see gate B4 out my window.  Pilot:  “Hey folks, we just need to wait five minutes for the small plane to move off our gate and we can pull up.”  “Yay,” I thought, “I can still make it.”  Wrong.  The plane pulled left up to gate C21 and my UA app dinged to tell me I was not departing from gate F20 . . .”Only a 22 minute walk” the app said.  Knowing this was not a 22 minute walk, I decided to plow the road.

     My wife had a tight connection once and her seatmate near the rear of the plane said, “Follow me, I will plow the road and get you out of here so you can catch your plane,” and true to his word, he did just that.  I put my backpack in front of me and excused myself from row 33 forward and every person who heard me say, “I have a very short connection,” stepped aside and said, ‘Go ahead, go.”  At row 5, there was a woman with a bag the size of a small whale standing between me and the door but once she moved, I had it made, but trouble loomed.  There was an elderly woman in the seat to the left who had boarded with much difficulty even with her traveling helper.  I tapped her on the shoulder while making eye contact with her helper and said, “Excuse me, can I slide by you?  I have a very tight connection.”  Both of them said, “Oh, by all means, go ahead.”

     It was wonderful that 99.9 percent of the people I encountered on this plane were understanding.  Then I met the .1 percent.  I felt a hand on my right shoulder and a fiftyish looking guy with a goatee and salt and pepper hair said in a voice that sounded just like Dr, Phil, “Hey buddy, I have a tight connection, too.  You don’t see me being a jerk about it.”  Hmmm.  Do I explain to him that I just came from row 33 and he is in row 5?  Do I have to tell him that if I do not make this flight, I will be sleeping at the airport tonight?  This was not what I wanted to hear 15 hours into an 18 hour travel day, so I shook him off, said, “Sorry, I do not have time for a debate here,” and dashed up the raceway.  At the top, I asked the agent to call ahead and tell them to not close the door on the plane until I got there and he said, “I am on it – go, go, go.”

     For the record, I picked them up and laid them down the whole way and only rested on the down and up escalators in the underground passage between the C and B terminals.  The app’s

‘22 minute walk’ took me at least 25 minutes (picture a Gold Medal pace in an Olympic event).  I arrived at my gate with ten minutes to spare.  When I told the agent I was the one they had called about from gate C21, he said, “You came all the way from C21?  Do you need assistance? Are you okay?”  I was a hot sweaty mess by then but I assured him as long as the plane hadn’t boarded, I would be fine.

     I actually arrived 20 minutes early but did not know that when I departed C21.  Gates F20 and F22 shared the same raceway and were boarding flights at the same time.  F22 was heading to Chattanooga, Tennessee so they had to wait 10 minutes for another gate agent to go down and make sure the Tennessee passengers went down the left corridor and those on the flight to Hancock went to the right.  The steward on our flight had some fun with it.  Just before we pulled back, he asked, “If there is anyone who would rather go to Chattanooga, you have to go now before I close the door.”

     When you travel, stuff happens.  My wife has spent at least three nights in Chicago and two in San Francisco on various trips so I do not complain to her about any of my trivial travel problems.  You shrug it off and marvel how many rude people take out hitches in their travel plans on the gate agents who are just trying to do their job.  Having seen enough videos of rude behavior on airplanes, I can attest that I departed with haste, but I was not rude nor did the majority of the people who let me pass treat me like I was being rude.  I wonder if ‘Dr. Phil’ made his connection? (and no, I do not secretly wish he didn’t).  Grumbling about the people who insist on dragging more baggage with them than their allotted share of space can accommodate won’t change people’s behavior, but I still grumble to myself.  Even when your travels hit a few speedbumps (like ‘Dr. Phil’), all you can do is step over them and move along!

Top Piece Video:  Live from Royal Albert Hall – anybody but CCR do a better Travelin’ Song?