I feel a little sheepish for not having posted about my cousin Jennifer’s bridal shower and bachelorette outing a couple of weekends ago, when her wedding is already this coming Saturday. Posting has become more inflexible with my new camera. When the photos were taken from my cameraphone, I’d just email them to myself and I’d have them online to post from wherever I am. Now that the photos are taken from a “real” camera and need to be downloaded to a computer first, they’re downloaded to the PC at home and I can’t access them from any other computer. So I move on, for now, to my travels last weekend.

I had a lot of airport and plane hopping, taking two flights to get to Florida and two flights to come back. The shuttle picking me up from home to take me to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) 50 miles away was half an hour early. I was still getting ready in the house when phone calls started coming in to my cell phone. I didn’t get to the phone in time, and that’s when the driver started honking. It was still dark out at 5:15 a.m. and Mr. W ran out in his shorts to tell the driver I was on my way, so that the jerk would quit waking up my neighbors. There was only one other passenger and we got to the airport before 6:30 a.m. for my 9 a.m. flight. The security line was INSANE. People coiled through the ropes indoors, spilled outdoors, lined up down the block into the next building. Good thing I had no baggage to check and was able to get straight into this line. It wasn’t until I was inside when I realized the Los Angeles Kings (hockey team) and their cheerleaders were ahead of me. I didn’t even know hockey HAD cheerleaders. Do they skidaddle onto the ice, slipping and sliding, to cheer? Cuz otherwise, who could see them? Anyway, FOX Sports was there with them and they set up a DJ booth at their gate, monopolizing the flight, I’d imagine.

I killed time by doing makeup in the bathroom and texting friends, sitting behind large Southerners in cowboy boots and gallon hats speaking to each other in cool-sounding drawls.

Southwest Airlines doesn’t assign seating, so after receiving a boarding sequence order after check-in (which I’d done online), the seats are first-come, first-served. As I walked into the cabin, I noted all the large people seated in the window and aisle seats of the same 3-seat row, leaving only a half-seat-sized slot in between them. Who’s gonna sit between them?! I kept moving farther and farther back in the plane. People looked up at me as I passed, some pensively, some hopefully (cuz I’m comparatively small), and I got lucky and found an open aisle seat next to two middle-aged women. They were friendly through the entire flight, telling me they were going home to Tennessee, and the woman next to me told me she’d moved there from Minnesota, where it snowed all the time so she was more than happy to give away her nearly-new snowblower to be in better weather. I fell asleep at some point, and when I awoke, I discovered the two of them had been needing to use the restroom but didn’t want to wake me. When we all returned from our bio breaks, we chatted again, and I told them that my final destination was not Nashville, but that I would enjoy the Nashville layover by redeeming a drink bet from a friend. The woman at the window wanted to see the book I was reading, ironman triathlete Brendan Brazier’s “Thrive: The Vegan Nutritional Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life.” The woman next to me wanted to see my wedding rings. A flight attendant came by and copied down the title of my book, which she’d been peering at as I’d slept on it, to buy for her triathlete boyfriend. I in turn took a gander at a friendly man’s textbooks from across the aisle, as he was learning Mandarin Chinese, a language I speak mostly-fluently. We arrived Nashville airport smoothly and early.

I ran off to meet Bat, who was there early to send off another friend and was now sitting at an airport bar having a beer. (Turned out the other friend didn’t make it before me, as originally planned.) It’s kind of funny meeting someone for only the second time ever when the friendship itself had progressed in the interim. You kind of see them differently. The first time (a few years ago when we happened to be in Vegas at the same time), it was a careful and polite appraisal and some small talk. This time, we were sincerely looking forward to spending some time chatting with a friend. He suggested I spend 15 minutes of my 70-minute layover having a drink with him, I waved it off and said I had more time than that. When I finally got up and went to the gate, 40 minutes had passed, and with a delay going back through security screening by the time I rushed to the gate they were already calling my name over the intercom. How embarrassing.

This time I found a man sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty row, and asked if I could sit with him. He moved over to the window and I took the aisle. He watched me text Jordan and Bat to say that I was safely on the flight to Orlando, it was leaving on time. He watched as I received prompt texts in response. (He also stayed politely mute as a flight attendant admonished me to turn my phone off so that we could take off early.) Then he asked me about how text messaging works, and the leaps and bounds (and to an extent, the unnecessities) of technological advancements. I learned that he’s a retired man who is now a writer and poet as his retirement pursuit. His writings center around metaphysical theories and experiences, and he’s had what sounded to me like an existential breakthrough from a rather sheltered childhood into the realities of a hard life. His journey sounded very interesting, and I’m not just referring to his visit to Nashville to visit his son. At the end of the flight, we exchanged web addresses — the “keeping-in-touch” method of the 21st century — and I learned his name is Jack Shinholser, of www.iseepoetry.com. Since he lives in Florida, he likely wouldn’t be doing one of his usual meet-the-author booksignings at a Borders or Barnes & Noble near me, so I’ll have to make sure I look for his works on my own. When we disembarked he was nice enough to walk me through the large airport to street level, and gave me a friendly hug as we separated and I waited for Jordan.

I’ll address my actual stay in Florida in a future post with photos.

Flat Coke & Flies, along with her new s.o., drove me to the Tampa Bay airport on my return home Sunday. We hugged goodbye curbside, snapped some photos, and I breezed through security to arrive at my gate just as they were about to board. Shortly before walking into the boarding chute, I handed the flight attendant my boarding pass, which she held under the computerized scanner. Instead of the “ding” of passengers entering before me, my boarding pass caused the computer to emit a buzz. “Uh-oh,” the flight attendant said, calling me back. What? Have I been chosen by random to be strip-searched? “You’re not on this flight, your flight is boarding here at this gate after this one,” she explained, returning my boarding pass. They were running late and this flight was going elsewhere, and my flight was lined up behind it for the gate. Thank goodness for computers! I settled back to wait and behind me, I heard someone else’s boarding pass buzz and the same explanation given to that passenger. Soon, someone decided it was easier to simply change gates and let my flight board immediately from another gate instead of wait for this gate to be freed up, so we all walked two gates down and boarded, departing 15 minutes later than scheduled to Denver, Colorado.

Feeling again like I was being appraised by already-seated passengers, I made my way through the cabin. Once more, I sat in an aisle seat, a man having taken the window seat in that row before me. Soon a rather corpulent woman made her way in and asked to sit between us, so I got out to let her in. She initially made efforts to contain her arms within the invisible borders of her seating area, but soon she discovered that she gained two inches on either side of her if she lifted the arm rests up and out of the way, so she made our three seats into a long bench seat. I was surprised she did that without checking with either of us, but the extra room was nice, I suppose. Not that I needed it. She was rather in-your-face friendly and overly helpful, and talkative. At one point she asked to see my wedding rings, also, admiring them. “It seems to get a lot of women’s attention,” I told her half-laughing. I had been asked to see the rings all weekend. “Probably because there’s so much bling,” she said. Funny how no one in California, unless they were my friends, seem to notice or think the rings were anything unusual. I live in a superficial spoiled region of designer accessory owners. She asked about my trip and destination, another flight attendant noticed and asked me about my “Thrive” book, offered to let me run up and down the aisle for exercise, I took a nap, was nudged on two occasions by the woman into awakening to let the guy on the inside use the restroom, and soon we were in Denver. An infant had screamed in my ear earlier at takeoff but had gone instantly silent after her mother did something. I now turned around and smiled at the new mother, asking her what she did to calm her baby down so quickly. She said, “I just held her against my chest, really tightly.”
“That’s all it took?” I asked in surprise.
“Well, it worked,” she smiled. Wow, gotta remember that one. It seemed like there was a baby screaming behind me on all the other flights and this was the first parent that was able to anything about it.

I had been apprehensive about the flight times, since we’d left late and I only had a 40-minute layover this time, so given 30 minutes for preboarding, I was glad there was no Bat here to miss out on playing with. The flight made up its late start in the air and we arrived early. I walked off the plane, went to the restroom, walked by a gate that happened to be for my next flight, and saw that they were preparing to board. Holy cow. That’s cutting it close. We boarded my final flight to good ol’ Orange County in Southern California, and this time I walked farther back into the plane, toward some empty rows, determined get away from the noise at the engines and wings which is where I seemed to always end up. I scooted all the way in to make it easier for still-coming passengers and noted that there are people seated in the midde seat of their row to take up as much room as possible, hopeful that people wouldn’t sit with them. How rude. It was a full flight and soon I had two people next to me. “If these two flights are like the first two, then that was the friendly people flight, and this one should be the bonding with someone flight.” I was wrong, this was just a normal flight with minimal conversation. Gotta love Southern Californians. None of that Southern comfort.

When we were getting ready to leave for the airport, Flat Coke had asked me whether I was regretful of having to leave beautiful Clearwater Beach, Florida to go back home. I didn’t have to even think about it as I told her that no, I am ready to be home. She looked surprised. Three days is about tops for me on vacation before I got homesick, and in this case, I felt my first twinge of missing home on the second flight to Florida before vacation had even started. I just missed Mr. W. He texts now and the iPhone can finally send/receive photos and videos, so we kept in touch over the weekend, but it’s not the same as having him physically there, within touching distance. Despite the fact that he was irritated picking me up upon arrival, as I’d exited the airport onto the “wrong” street level, it was still nice coming home to him and we went to sushi immediately. When we got home, I hugged his half-asleep form tightly and thought about how nice it is to be in a relationship in which I could ask, “So what’d you do all weekend?” and not have an immediate nausea reflex, dreading activities that would devastate me, or dreading the lies I would hear so much that I simply wouldn’t ask at all. I enjoyed my weekend with my girlies and new friends very much, but one of my favorite parts was still coming home.