The figurative me continues it trip to Lovelock. As the figurative me walks, I ponders our upcoming trip to England and Europe. As with every trip, I started out by saying that I was not going to be spending a lot of money on this trip. We leave late in the evening on the Friday after Thanksgiving. As with every trip, I have planned, and then overplanned the trip, and spent more money than I wanted even before we hit pavement. But we will have a great time, and won’t have any of the trip on credit cards to be paid off after the trip. So I daydream.
As I daydream, I recall that it was a year ago today that we ended our marvelous trip to Canada. Nothing memorable happened that day, but as the mind jumps from one topic to the next, I think of our last day on our trip to Wales in December 2003:
Every trip must have an end. Ours ended on December 14. Significantly, Saddam Huessian’s trip ended on the same day. But more about that later.
When we checked into the Park Lane Marriott, we were provided a complimentary breakfast if we agreed to fill out a questionnaire on our return home. So as we arose on Sunday morning, after looking out our hotel window at Hyde Park for a few minutes, we decided to take advantage of the breakfast. We were seated literally across the street from Hyde Park at near street level. I have over the years spent a lot of time walking by people eating in fancy-dancy restaurants, wondering how they rated such that they were able to eat at a fancy dancy place. Well, on that day, Dorey and I were sitting in a fancy dancy restaurant while people walked by looking at us, wondering how we rated. Luck, my good fellow. Luck.
After breakfast we headed back to the room. Our plane was scheduled to leave at 2:30, and it was only 9:00 a.m. I started, however, to get nervous, as I always do when I travel, so we decided to head out to the airport.
We decided not to take the underground back to the airport, but to go in style by taking the train. In this, I as reminded of a great movie, My Dinner With Andre. In the movie, Wally Shawn, a fledgling actor is invited to have dinner with a theater director named Andre Gregory. He takes the subway to dinner, and rides with all the weird creatures who inhabit the subway. In the subway, Wally is concerned with all of the matters of everyday world. Where is he going to find a job? Does his live-in girlfriend like him, and all that. This is, of course, symbolic, of the hero’s journey who must first go underground before reaching the new world in which the hero will have moments of self discovery. The hero must be first separated from the mundane. Wally’s new world is the restaurant, where Andre Gregory tells Wally the most bizarre adventure stories one could hope to hear. In listening to these stories, Wally becomes initiated into Andre Gregory’s world, and in turn becomes the new person. After the meal, Wally returns home. He does not, however, take the subway, but travels in a cab among the others who have been initiated.
Our first trip off of this rock was a heroes’ journey for Dorey and me. It was, then, appropriate that we would not take the Underground back to the airport but would take surface streets, able to mingle with the initiated. So we headed to Paddington Station, where we would catch the express train for the airport.
I was glad that we left as early as we did, as there was a huge line at the airline counter. We were in line for literally an hour and 20 minutes. While in line, we spoke to a student who had just completed a semester abroad, and was returning home for the Christmas break. She had a wonderful experience. Our young student did, however, have one or two annoying habits. In England, lines are called "queues." In America, lines are called "lines." She insisted, even though nearly everyone in line was an American, in calling the line a queue. It reeked of phoniness. I felt for her poor parents who would have to put up with her phoniness over the Christmas holiday.
After finally reaching the counter, and getting our stuff checked, we passed through the security checkpoint. In most airports, at this point, we would have proceeded to our gate. At Heathrow, however, everyone is first sent into a huge waiting area. It has thousands of seats surrounded by store after store. You know when your gate is ready when one of the many monitors informs you that your gate is ready. We sat down, and waited, and waited and waited some more. We wandered around, bought a paper, and did all the rest of the stuff that one does while waiting, and waited, and waited some more. We then watched the people, many of whom were watching us. Heathrow people watching is a great experience. It is truly an International Airport, and we saw Americans, English, French, Germans, Africans, Russians, Asians, and probably everything else. I am certain that if we had taken a census, citizens from most of the world’s countries would have been present that Sunday morning.
Finally, the monitor showed that our gate was ready, and we walked down a dark, dank corridor to it. We had to pass through yet another security check, and then had to sit down in the gate area while we waited for our plane. As we sat there, we saw a bunch of people huddling around the television set at the end of the waiting area. The news was that Saddam Huessian had been captured, living in a cave. A woman with a Texan accent announced loudly to the rest of us that with the capture, George Bush had just been reelected. I wanted to give her a little political lesson at that moment. The lesson is that the election would not be held for another eleven months. In politics, where a week is an eternity, one could not predict how the fickle American populous would vote after several eternities. And in fact, as I write this several months later, I don’t see Saddam’s capture being a major election issue. I spared this stupid woman my analysis.
We were finally let onto the plane, and it took off on time. We tried to sleep and watched a couple of movies, Matchstick Men, and some English murder mystery whose title I can’t recall, on the trip. Nothing of great significance occurred.
We landed in O’Hare and had to proceed through customs and immigration and then through customs. The immigration part took only a couple of minutes, once we found the right line. We showed the guy our passports, and into America we were ushered. We then had to pick up our checked luggage and go through customs. We had completed the customs card on the plane, showing that we had purchased about $650.00 worth of stuff on our trip. When we approached the custom’s agent––a snotty nosed brat of about 15 (ok, maybe 25, but still he was a snotty nosed brat who thought he was a tough guy because he could carry a gun and was allowed to harass fat middle aged couples coming through his line––OOOH, I’m so impressed) asked us how long we had been outside of the United States. "10 days." "Well, your form says that you only bought $650.00 worth of stuff. Are you certain that is all that you bought?" I wanted to say, "Leave me alone, you little punk." If anything, we had been overly honest in our custom’s declaration. I did not want to spend the night in Chicago, so I just "yep." Dorey said, "Honest, that all we have."
It was probably the lawyer in me, but I wished she had not said that. Every time a witness says something like, "Honest" or "And that’s the truth," they sound as if they are lying. I was afraid that because Dorey had said that, we would now be subject to an in depth examination. Thankfully, the snot nose kid just gave us the once over, and said, "OK, you can pass." He did it in such a manner that you could tell that he did not believe us.
After this little humiliation, we had to then go to get our bags rechecked by the airline. This took a little bit of time. After all of this, our plane was set to depart in about 30 minutes. We had to take a shuttle train from this area of the airport to the terminal, and pass through yet another security check. We were down to 25 minutes. We got through it, and started to run to our gate.
We need not have bothered. Our plane was delayed, and was not even at the gate. In fact, it did not arrive at the gate for another three hours. During our wait, we called home, found out that Kate and Ariel were ok, that Alan Gooch had died, and that otherwise things were fine. We ate a bad McDonalds hamburger, and wandered around. We watched a father and son throw a football in the gate area. And we watched, maybe a million times, the video of Saddam’s mouth being checked by some military dentist. Once was quite enough, frankly, and it became nauseating to watch over and over.
Finally, our plane arrived, and we boarded on our last leg. Our plane was coming from France, and they showed an awful French movie for this portion of the trip. Dorey and I were asleep within minutes, dreaming of returning to London.
So as I daydream about trips past, I have walked 571,685 steps in 47 days. I have walked 270 miles. I have 43 miles to go before I reach Lovelock.
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