Traveling
around the country will smooth wear you out. This past week I’ve
grabbed eight flights to various places for meetings in several
cities. If you’ve never traveled much, I suggest you do it then
call me after six months and tell me if you think it’s still fun.
I’ll bet you have a different idea about it by that time. Trust me
there is no place like home. It gets really bad when you wake up
in the morning in some strange hotel and have a difficult time
remembering what town you are in that day. Then you make your way
out to the parking lot where you thought you parked your rent car,
but can’t find it. You came in on some late night flight and
thought the car was silver, but it’s really white and you spend
ten minutes walking over the entire lot, hitting the remote door
lock in hopes you can hear where your car is, since you can’t see
it.
Once you find it, the fun begins as then you have to find your way
to wherever it is that you are going and then try to retrace your
steps in the forlorn hope that you can locate the airport. Many a
weary traveler can identify with driving on the freeway somewhere
watching the sky for incoming airplanes and using that as the
guide to find the airport. Sometimes you can actually see the
airport, but can’t figure out how to get off the freeway and drive
to it. Murphy’s law dictates that the tighter your flight
schedule, the harder it will be for you to find the return lot for
the rental car. You know you need to buy gas for the car, since
they charge you what seems like $5.00 a gallon for what you used,
but have you ever in your life seen a service station close to the
rental lots? I haven’t.
After you survive the bus trip from the lot to the terminal, then
you have to endure the new security procedures that have been
instituted since 9/11. Might as well take every piece of metal off
before you get there since you’ll have to do it anyway. Glasses,
watch, keys, pens, pencils, pager, phone all need to be stowed
somewhere other than on your body. If you tend to arrive late, I’d
suggest you consider traveling in the nude, as it would speed up
the security checks much faster for you. Do not, I say again, do
not wear bulky leather clothing with silver studs and lots of
beads…you will be there forever. Or at least the people in line
behind you will be. Some folks don’t seem to get the concept that
times have changed and they haven’t figured out what to do when
they get to the checkpoints.
They will tend to want to argue with the person working on the
machines, which slows the entire process and backs the waiting
line up for another ¼ of a mile or so. There are also plenty of
folks out there who still want to push the envelope and try to
shove that oversized bags into the overhead compartment. It’s
really a matter of physics. An object too big to fit into some
place just won’t go, no matter how hard you push. Here you are
trying to get into your seat and some bozo is holding up the
entire line while he tries in vain to stuff a bag big enough to
hold a mattress into a bin designed to hold a pillow. Finally,
some crewmember works her way to the scene of the accident and
pulls the bag out and has it loaded into the baggage compartment
while the wife of the bozo is yelling since she’s concerned that
the sombreros might be crushed. Time passes and I get older by the
minute.
All I want to do is to get to my seat, stow my stuff under my
feet, get a cup of coffee or whatever is available and read about
the scenic sights that I need to be looking out for at my next
destination. Things like the snake farm, the tattoo museum or a
cheese display. I think I’m going to survive until the leather and
bead wearing team of Mr. and Mrs. Bozo end up sitting next to me
and want to talk about how much fun it is to travel. I think I’ll
have something stronger than coffee.
