FLASHBACK - Travel Sagas

Somehow I never posted this...

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be on top of the ball, all of the time. To be at home, calmly sitting next to my matching luggage, peacefully whiling away the last 30 minutes before I need to leave the house. To arrive at the airport two, maybe two-and-a-half hours early, a rock of serenity in the swirling eddies of airport traffic, content to placidly inch your way up even the most listless line. That is not my life.

This has not been the most sterling of travel weeks for me. I missed a flight out of Taiwan on Thursday, and then on Friday I missed my bus because I couldn’t figure out how to open the front door. I kid you not. Bear with me.

The flight story is depressingly anticlimactic. I have a tendency to fill my plate too full, to exchange too little cash, to cut things too close. Suffice it to say that I’m not “down” with margins of error. Stephanie, I think, enjoys life more than I do. She is one of life’s amblers, an appreciator of beauty and a smeller of flowers. Unfortunately, our two personalities combined to catastrophic effect.

I sat in the back seat, watching the cars, inexplicable in their abundance, and cursed… everything. As if some sort of malicious hive beast, the traffic devoured the few seconds of buffer time that I had allotted, and I just sat there, helpless to catch my 10:00 flight.

9:10
9:20
My dark silence was broken by Stephanie talking to Jeff in the front seat:
“Man, Robb must just be praying SO hard right now.”
I was not praying. I was late.
“Mm Hmm”
Then I prayed.
9:30
“Don’t worry Robb, we’ll make it!”
“Mm Hmm”
9:35
9:40
9:45
“See? We made it! Pleeenty of time!”
“Mm Hmm”

Apparently 15 minutes is not sufficient time to get checked in, go through security, and board the plane for my international flight. Who knew?

It ended fine, I was booked on a later flight without incident or charge, and the world was a better place. Still, more excitement than I would like.

Fast forward one day. I was in Hong Kong, on my way down the elevator to catch a bus right outside the building. I pushed the right door. Nothing. I pulled the right door. Nothing. Pushed the left door. Pulled the left door. I calmly looked around for some sort of a latch or lever. Push. Pause. Pull. Pause. Push. Pause. Pull. Pause. As I stood there, a grown man playing silly buggers with a glass door, I saw my bus drive by. Pushpullpushpullpushpushpushpush. Damn.
Only then did I notice the (only) small black button, hidden on the door at eye level. Sneaky Hongkanese devils.

And now, this morning. After a leisurely morning of packing and chatting with my hosts, I made the first leg of my four-part journey to Chongqing. I would bus to the MTR (subway) station, catch the MTR, then catch a bus from mainland Hong Kong to the Shenzhen airport (just on the other side of the Chinese border), and finally catch a flight to Chongqing. Unfortunately I had about 150 lbs of luggage packed into duffel bags, and had no idea how I would get them to the elevator, much less navigate the MTR with them. Yet another instance of brilliant planning. But I figured out how to transform one bag into a backpack, and it was fine. The bus and the MTR went without incident, as did getting on the bus to Shenzhen. Keep in mind here that at this point I was more a moving mountain of luggage than a man, and was shooting from the hip. Had things not worked out as planned, I had no plan B. So the stress level was fairly high.

45 minutes into the 90-minute bus trip, we pulled over and everyone got off the bus. Not seeing any other option, I followed the crowd, which led me to once again pick up my luggage (dangit) and blindly walk into the building directly ahead of us. It turns out that it was immigration, and it all went relatively smoothly, but when traveling as heavily as I do, all surprises are unwelcome surprises.

Skipping forward to the airport. As a warning, if this sounds tedious, that’s because it was. Domestic Asian flights only allow about 45 lbs of luggage, and so I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of avoiding paying for the extra poundage. What I didn’t expect was for both of my pieces of luggage (both of which went Portland-LA-Taipei-HK without any problems) to set off the scanners. One had a lighter in it which I neither knew was there nor cared about keeping, and the other had a largish military knife that I very much cared about keeping. After the fifth time the guard unsheathed the knife, I figured that he just enjoyed playing with knives, but did not think it prudent to tell the airport security guard to stop messing around and get on with it. So I stood there, as the time counted down to my flight. Which I was NOT going to miss. Finally he cleared my luggage, then I had to run to the overweight luggage counter, calculate my fee, then get that amount changed into Chinese Yuan, then go back and get my receipt, then finally go back to the ticket counter and get my boarding pass. Phew. Then came the security checkpoint, where my carry-on was “too dense” for the scanners, which I took as something of a complement to my packing prowess. It made me feel good until I realized that I had to completely unpack my very meticulously packed carry-on, then try and put it all back together again. I stopped laughing pretty quickly.

In the end, I got from Seattle to Chongqing on time, and I even arrived at each destination on the day that I was scheduled to, if not on the flight. Ultimately, though, I’ve pretty much lost interest in this story, and only finished it for the sake of my beloved mother, who likes to know these kinds of things. But now I’m done.