August 30, 2006
SF trip rundown/wrap-up ::
travel — tagged california, friends, narrative, san francisco and travel
10:43 am
So, my weekend trip to San Francisco was bookeneded by two extreme travel experinces (I already noted the return trip, and my trip out included a six hour delay at O’Hare) but the trip out to San Francisco to visit Maureen was really fun. I’m glad I went. As I like to do after long trips, here’s a list of the events worth remembering:
1. Landing in SFO after the six hour delay in O’Hare, and being able to get all the way to Noe Valley on the Bart and the MUNI bus system after being awake for something like 18 hours. Then staying up for another three hours catching up with Maureen and meeting her friend Heidi.
2. Driving down the coast on Route 1, visiting beaches that, although they were at high tide, were still beautiful, with a landscape like nothing I’d ever seen before. (It was my first time seeing the non-urban areas of Northern California).
3. Driving further south on Route 1 to buy organic, locally grown strawberries from a farmstand. I also had hot strawberry cider, which was kind of funky and had some serious pulp in it, but it was sweet and I enjoyed it.
4. Driving, somewhat accidentally, all the way to Santa Cruz before heading back to San Francisco on Route 17 (Google map). I remember when I was a skateboarder kid, Santa Cruz stood in my mind as an idyllic, untouchable land where the weather was always warm and the skateboarding was never hindered by winter. Seeing the city was impressive, if only for the realization that it was a real place, with real people in it. Also, there was a nice health food store that carried tasty vegan cookies. And Route 17, with all its twists and turns, is a really fun road to take, especially at high speeds.
5. Making dinner on Saturday night. It included marinated tofu and rice, and was something Maureen put together herself. That always makes me feel better than going out to a restaurant.
6. Walking from Maureen’s place on Elizabeth to the 24th Street Mission Bart station on Sunday morning. There’s something about San Francisco streets on Sunday morning that makes me feel, I don’t know, at peace. I remember feeling the same way the last time I was in San Francisco.
7. Visiting SFMOMA with Maureen, seeing tons of artwork I was familiar with, and some that I was not so familiar with but still enjoyed. There was an extensive exhibit by Matthew Barney (see his Wikipedia article or his flash-intensive website), who is probably one of the most prolific artists I’ve ever encountered. His work, which utilizes all different forms of media, took up almost an entire floor of the museum and included Bjork as one of the subjects/characters, dealt with, among other things, Japanese culture surrounding its whaling industry. I found the whole experience left me numb, but mostly because there was so much to process. Now, two days later, I’m still thinking about it. What that says about its quality, I’m not sure, but I think the exhibit is worth seeing.
8. Taking the ferry to Sausalito. You get an interesting view of the San Francisco skyline that you can’t get anywhere else. Also, I remember seeing the new Bay Bridge as it was being constructed—the new bridge paralelling the old one, extending out only so far into the bay, then abruptly ending. Also, as we got closer to Sausalito we could see the fog come over the mountains, which reminded me of condensed air cascading from the freezer on hot summer days.
9. Being totally exhausted by the time we got back to Maureen’s place on Sunday afternoon. She took a nap, I read a book. Then I got starving and went out for burritos. Came home and dozed on the couch with a cat purring on my lap.
10. Wrapping my mind around the strange weather in San Francisco. There’s no rain there this time of year, just fog. Also, the temperature is actually colder than it is here in Vermont, with daytime temperatures hovering around 65 degrees or so. And it gets cold at night—cold enough for sweaters and furnaces. This is not the California I learned of when I was a child. But of course, you would get out of the city and have to strip all your layers of thermals off start seriously overheating.
And just to give an update on my baggage: as I suspected, it was on the United flight on which I was confirmed, not on the flights on which I flew standby. So I arrived at the Burlington airport at 10 AM today to find my baggage sitting with the others at the airport’s miniature baggage claim area. Not too bad, I must say.
August 29, 2006
Insane travel ::
travel — tagged california, flight, narrative, travel and washington dc
1:25 am
Earlier today I pictured myself in exactly the position I am in right now, awake at nearly 1 AM, typing away on my computer because my body thinks the time is three hours earlier. But the way I got here is totally different than what I had in mind. See, I just got in two hours ago from a trip out to San Francisco to visit Maureen for the weekend. The trip was a lot of fun—I was happy to catch up with Maureen, to meet new people, and to see a part of California I hadn’t seen before, including a pretty long trip down the coast that ultimately landed us in Santa Cruz before heading back North to the city—and getting back home today was a truly and adventure.
It all started when Maureen dropped me off at SFO on her way out of town to LA. I was two hours early for my flight—more than enough time to get checked in, get my baggage checked, and to hopefully spend most of the rest of the time waiting (impatiently) to board the flight. But when I went to check in using one of the computer terminals, I found that my flight had been delayed for so long that I was going to miss my connection. So, the computer rescheduled my itinerary, placing me on a flight that was scheduled to leave at 10 PM (yeah, that’s right. It was six hours later than my original departure time). But the program did put me on standby for another set of flights, the first of which was scheduled to leave SFO at 12:45, which gave me almost no time to get through security and get to the terminal before the plane left.
I made it in time, and I got in on standby. The new plane was a 767, a plane so enormous that looking out the windows somehow made the entire world seem small, even while parked at the terminal. I noted as we taxied toward takeoff that we left SFO late, which meant I had very little time to catch my connection at Dulles. Knowing the connection was likely to be the last one of the day, I tried not to stress out too much at the possibility of being put up in some anonymous, plastic-coated hotel room in suburban Washington, D.C., or worse, spend all night in the United terminal at Washington. So as the plan zig-zagged across the continent, I occcupied my mind by reading, by cataloging the trip, and by trying to find the Clif bar that I’d bought earlier, which had fallen under my seat.
One surreal aspect of flying is that sometimes you find yourself in a city you never expected to be in, that’s thousands of miles away from your planned destination. When you find yourself there, it’s like a vivid dream. Washington/Dulles was like that for me. Also, I wasn’t dressed for the weather. At 9 PM (for me, it was only 6), the temperature was hovering at 90 degrees—roughly 20 – 30 degrees warmer than anything I’d experienced while in San Francisco—and with my long pants and thermal undershirt, I definitely was over-dressed for it. I got off the plane to check the terminal I needed to get to to catch my connection to Burlington, which turned out to be halfway down the next terminal. And the entry was blinking an alert that the flight was boarding. I had to run.
I ran harder than I thought I could. I ran past crew members hustling toward their own flights. I cut between befuddled families who you could swear it was their first time in an airport. At one point, I seem to remember hurdling a roller bag someone had in tow, but it may be my tendency to aggrandize the facts for the sake of a good story. But no matter what, note that nowhere between the C and D terminals in Washington/Dulles are there any fast-tracks, so you must rely on your own athleticism and endurance.
I got to my terminal to find it empty. Desolate. There was one woman at the boarding gate, demanding my name, I told her I was on standby, and then told her my name after she asked for it again. “I called your name, you weren’t here,” she told me. “Late connection,” I replied, feeling oddly like I had something to apologize for. She wrote my seat assignment down on my standby ticket and let me out on the tarmac, where I caught a flight up to Burlington. At the end of it all, I got here an hour earlier than I was originally scheduled to, but my bags didn’t make it with me. I assume, for the sake of my own sanity, that they will arrive tomorrow, on the flight I should have been on had all of this fallen apart at some point. Come to think of it, as I write this, I realize that my bags have just taken off from SFO and are on their way to meet me.
So, earlier today, I thought I’d be in the situation I was in now. But I figured I’d have my checked baggage with me. And that I would have flown through O’Hare, where I would have had a two-hour layover, during which I could have grabbed dinner. So things turned out a little different than I expected—at the end of the day, though, the adventure, and the opportunity to tell the story, made it worthwhile.
