Day one of vacation – travel day

So leading up to our vacation there were many preparations that needed to be taken care, who is watching the dog, who will water the plants, do we have enough pairs of shorts and do we have enough of the Ocean Spray sugar free Cran-Pomegranate? Yeah, evidently they do not sell it is Texas so we are toting enough of this powered substance to make over 100 quarts of this stuff. God only knows what they are going to do with it. We had completed all the necessary work and lined up our Niece to handle the bulk of the household chores. So the day of our departure had arrived, at 4:15am no less. Neither of us slept very well the night before, Bride with the excitement of seeing her family and her anxiety about flying and her worry that we forgot to pack something – that all combined kept Bride from getting to sleep until after 3am. And everyone knows, when Bride ain’t sleeping, husband ain’t sleeping either. Not that she was intentionally trying to keep me awake but her up and down did not help me sleep very well either. As we were getting ready she offered a blanket apology for the day, she said I did not sleep, I am excited and I do not like to fly so I am telling you now, “I am sorry for the bitch I am going to be today”. All I could do was smile and know that she would need pampered all day and she would get passed all that.

So we are all ready and Niece gets up, showers and is ready to go, we pile into the van and she wants to drive so she can remember how to get back to the airport when she picks us up. She did not do bad and handled a tricky pull in curbside at the airport so I was impressed. I was laughing inside because I thought it was funny to see a 23 year old without kids driving a minivan, I stopped when I realized – I am a 45 year old man without kids and I drive a minivan as well, anyway I let that go. By the time we arrived at the airport I could not remember if I had let our dog back in, he requires two trips in the morning but I was about 80% sure I did not let him back in. Knowing that Bride would kill me if she knew, I ran around the van when we got out to hug Niece and thank her and tell her she needed to stop by the house because I was pretty sure that I left Newton outside, I also asked her not to tell Bride. I called after we made it through security and asked, I had indeed let him in and at that point I felt I safe to let Bride know that I thought I had left him out but indeed did not – that could have been ugly and I thought my Niece would have perpetual leverage against me holding that knowledge. It was not to be this time my Padawan learner.

So we are at the airport and we check-in curbside, I love that you can do that and always tip the folks who work there well, that has to be a thankless job. Bill was nice and we talked about charging for bags and the price of tickets anymore and how SouthWest and Airtran are the reason that ticket prices across the board have remained low. He indicated that he would not be able to change our seating arrangements, we wanted to be on the side with only 2 seats, it was not to be. As we walk into the airport I notice, as always, folks seem to be in HUGE hurry. I have never understood that, if you know what time your plane leaves, just get your butt there ahead if time. Of all the places that you do not want to be stressed, it is the airport. There are computerized camera systems that can track your facial expressions and make assessments based on that. You think you were stressed before, 5 big men with green teeth and TSA uniforms jump out of the wood work and take you to the body cavity search area – that will peg the stress meter so hard a whole bottle of Zanex will not even put a dent in your anxiety. So in the cattle trough that is the screening area I see a lady who fits this bill, she is sweating, asking folks if she can cut and all the while she is dragging her poor son through all this, he appeared to be 6 or 7 and looked even more confused, tired and pissed off than she did. I was glad we left ourselves plenty of time!

So we get to gate C9 with the rest of the cattle, we are all sitting around, some patiently, some not so much. All waiting for the folks on the loudspeakers to call our section, all secretly wishing we needed special assistance or were able to purchase first class tickets. Why is it that they get to go first anyway, let me meek lead the mighty I say! Anyway we were assigned group 6, whatever that meant. It was seat 26E and 26F and while listening and watching I tried without success to determine the method they were using to board the plane. I did finally determine that before these folks had their coffee the drew straws and flipped tarot card to determine the method. There is no meaning to that madness, not that I could figure out anyway. So by this time Bride’s anxiety is sky high, and she takes “mothers little helper” that the doctor prescribed for her, her perspective on the world got a little more balanced and in turn so did mine. By the time they called group 6 she was sufficiently mellow and I was able to retune my ears to eliminate the frequency of screaming banshee child 4 people behind us – life was good. We board and make our way back to row 26, bumping into people who have their elbows sticking out and waiting for knuckleheads who are trying to stick a humongous piece of luggage into the overhead bin. We finally make it to our seat and 26D gets up and let us in, he has an odd little smile.

Once situated in our seats I noticed smiley, in 26D, had some kind of obsession with his watch. No matter I thought and I quickly drifted off to sleep, I awoke a couple of times to see Bride sleeping and to straighten my neck. I always wind up with a sore neck because when I sleep my head falls over on my shoulder. Bride slept with her head straight up, never faltered more than 1.2 degrees no matter how steep a bank the plane was in. We woke up about 30 minutes outside of Dallas, we were both refreshed. We started talking about our visit and how great it was going to be to see everyone. This is when I again noticed smiley’s obsession with his watch. He would look at his watch about every 105-125 seconds, he would twist the band a bit to the right, then over compensate to the left and then he would shift it back to the starting position. While he was doing this he would be staring at the face of that old silver analog dial like he was attempting to calculate the passage of time down to the femto-second (one millionth of one billionth of a second). He was now making me nervous, why was time so important to him? Was it just a compulsive obsessive issue or was he late, late for a very important date. I do not know, nor did I find out and I suspect I never will.

Upon arrival in Dallas I realized this is the first time I have ever been in this airport, not much different than any other really. On our way through the concourse I noticed a guy on a bicycle, he was a officer of the law and he was able to ride very slow through the crowd, I was impressed with his ability. I noticed he was in excellent shape, cyclist legs, very thin and muscular. Just as I was thinking about how hard it would be to ride a bike through the airport I spot another office of the law, this one on a modified segue, those two wheel self balancing contraptions you see occasionally. I say modified because this one had three wheel and the guy was old, fat and looked completely out of shape. He looked winded just riding this battery powered pony. I remember thinking some sergeant someplace needed to rethink the assignments, fat boy gets the bike and the skinny guy gets the segue, that is what I was thinking – sorry. We stopped and got coffees and made our way to baggage claim to get our bag. It was sitting there waiting for us when we arrived, someone had taken it and 6 others off the carousel and placed them on the floor, lucky us. We grab the bag and out to the curb we go, both secretly betting if Bride’s brother would be on time. He was a few minutes late, construction traffic was to blame.

We made it to the Great state, that is Texas for you uninitiated.