Travels With Mommie

My mom, who is a generous and wonderful person, loves to travel and has included her children and nieces on an assortment of adventures. This is my turn. 

After spending the evening drinking scotch with my brother-in-law, I got up bright and early to go with my sister to pick up my mom and board the plane to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. 

We flew out of Sacramento on Southwest - a nine hour trip. Southwest is your basic shit sandwich. The flights are cheap, the crew is always friendly and sometimes genuinely funny, and they get you there. 

But -

The first come, first serve seating: we had Mavis in a wheelchair, so we had the advantage. But the tension around seating made the atmosphere boarding the plane like the scene in Do The Right Thing - one wrong move and that place blows like a powder keg. 

Food: Neither of us realized that there was no food on the flight, not until we saw people boarding with bags of Popeye’s Chicken that we realized there might not be any opportunity to eat on our 9 hour flight. Which we started at 5am.

Electronics: No way to charge them. On a 9 hour flight, which meant watching the battery life go down in a panic, hoarding your time, counting the minutes until you could get to a place where you could charge (I almost moved the shuttle driver’s phone out to replace it with my own, like a digital cuckoo)

But damn - I really wanted to be able to charge my phone. What are we, savages?

There were definitely some divertissements along the way. The bizarre breastfeeding cube in the airport. Gambling in Vegas: When I heard people talk about gambling in the Las Vegas airport and that the payouts were the worst, I imagined a few sad little slot machines lined up against the windows. What I got were huge bling-y displays of hope and avarice (a toxic combination if ever there was one). 

Prostitutes? Sure! Breastfeeding? Uh, no. No, no, no. 

Flying into Indianapolis, the whole ground below us was covered in low, grey, snow clouds, as far as the eye could see. Ground conditions were around freezing and the atmosphere was tense. So many people wanting to get out before if got really bad. The woman where I got my sandwich was saying that lots of people were changing their flights and trying to get out that day in anticipation of massive snowstorms in the region. Plus TSA was shorthanded because of the gov’t shutdown and local hotels were full because of a convention. She was thinking about auctioning a space on her couch when it got bad.

We had a long enough layover at Indianapolis (and how ofter do you hear THAT phrase?) so I could dash out and get some dinner. And again, the people were great, really helpful and funny.

In flight dinner

Like many experienced cruisers we came in the night before our cruise and stayed at a local hotel. So I’m thinking yeah, great, we spend a night there, no big deal, they have a shuttle from the airport and to the cruise port. Simple. Beige.

I was not expecting this weird kind of half space with people wandering through, checking in all hours of the day and night, hanging out with mounds of (red) luggage, making small talk. It reminded me of the movie Defending Your Life, where people are shuttled into the afterlife, waiting to be reborn. And instead of it being beige it was filled with tropical plants, animal benches, and giant blue Instagram worthy Adirondacks. 

And that's the truth