I'm usually a very cheerful traveler, but on this latest trip events conspired against my natural bonhomie to make the whole experience lousy and needlessly tiring. Nothing like the frank, unmitigated
"disaster" of missing the night's last flight out of China last year, but the kind of seemingly
endless string of annoyance and frustrations that makes molehills seem like mountains.
I originally planned to rant and rave about how awful it was, but it's been over a week now, I've had my therapy (oh blonde bubbly goodness, I salute you) and I can now write this up without going into fits of screaming all-caps. A skill that TV host Glenn Beck has yet to master, ESPECIALLY IN HIS NEW BOOK -- stay tuned for a review of his mangling of the message of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense".
Ahem. First, some context. Earlier in June I flew to the small college campus town of Moscow, Idaho, for some collaborative work with the same lovely people I worked with last year during my hiatus between grad school and the Great Postdoc Upgrade. My timing was calculated to coincide with the Evolution '09 conference organized by the Biology Department of U. Idaho -- a bit out of my field but of great personal interest, so hey, seize the opportunity, right? Right.
Well the collaborative work went very well, I learned new things at the conference and the weather was mostly sunny (while in Boston it was dreary, rainy and depressing the whole time -- nyaaah). No complaints there (apart from the banquet -- details in a minute) so never mind that.
Travel, however, was not smooth. On the way there, I had to take three flights: Boston to Minneapolis, Minnesota, from there to to Salt Lake City, Utah and finally to Spokane, Washington, where my hosts picked me up for the 2h-drive to Moscow (yup, it's really in the middle of nowhere). To be fair, the three-part journey was my fault: I'd picked out a cheap itinerary that just fit what I had in my Delta frequent flyer miles account. That'll teach me to skimp.
The first hiccup was when my second flight was delayed enough to cause a tight connection in Salt Lake City. I made my third flight alright, but my checked luggage did not. Meh. Good that I was staying over with my hosts for the first week anyway, so they provided me with basic necessities until my suitcase was delivered by the airline (done, impressively enough, by early afternoon the next day, which happened to be a Sunday). Bummer, but nothing tragic, sure, and I did get a fun Darwin t-shirt out of it.
Cue plasmids, margaritas, South American tree frog phylogenies. Move over Disneyland, this is what I call fun (well, maybe not the frog phylogenies).
Then came the eve of my return trip. The first sign of the mess that was to be was when the conference organizers 'fessed up to having screwed up the airport shuttle schedule. See, they had announced that they would set up several shuttles for the 2-hour trip to Spokane airport, based on people's flight times. Great. I had arranged for a flight leaving at 1 pm on Thursday 18th, to be sure to have plenty of time to say goodbye to people and not have to rush in the morning (saying I'm not a morning person is something of an understatement --on a downright cosmic scale), assuming there would be a shuttle leaving around 9:30 or 10 am. Good plan, yeah? Well, no. There was some kind of communication breakdown with the bus company, and we ended up with only two shuttle times: 7 am and 11 am. Considering the 2-hour trip length, I would have no choice but to go with the 7 am bus to Spokane, where I would then have to loiter in a very limited-amenities airport lounge for four hours.
With that barrel of fun to look forward to, I resolved at least to spend a good last day there. It was a Wednesday, there were no more microbial talks scheduled and I was getting a bit overdosed on eukaryote phylogenies and theoretical models by then, so I took the afternoon off to walk around town and revisit some of the places I'd hung out at last year.
Click here for some photos of summertime UI Moscow, and be sure to compare with the wintertime version here.
That was nicely relaxing, but time flew by and before I knew it, time for the final banquet! Oh goodie, I thought, envisioning tables heavily laden with roast boar and free-flowing mead -- or some such feast of Gallic proportions -- in the company of friends and good entertainment (fondly remembering the Plasmid Society banquet in Corfu, 2006).
Alas, poor Yorrick, disappointment was in the cards.
Well, to be fair, the food was fine and the French people I ended up with (through bad timing, having missed the chance to sit with my plasmid-loving peeps) were pleasant enough, as was the musical entertainment during the meal.
Things kind of went south, however, when the speeches started. That's the problem when three large societies organize a big meeting together: every single one's chairperson, president, and their little sister needs to have a go at a speech, give out here a career award, there a student prize, in endlessly self-multiplying categories. Lots of mutual congratulatory backslapping between the old-timers in the field, and humorous references that I'm sure were very funny to whomever was in on the joke.
I wasn't. So praise the Lord, I say, for the iPhone (Lord Steve, obviously), and praise AT&T for providing decent network coverage even in the furthest reaches of civilization. After catching up on my email, I took the opportunity to investigate what's with this "Twitter" thing that everyone seems to be going gaga over. My conclusion: it's a bit pointless as far as actual communication goes, but I must admit it's a very cathartic medium to blow off some steam in the form of acerbic comments when one is stuck for too long at a boring social function.
And before anyone suggests the obvious way of passing time at a function that's dragging on too long, let me just point out that drinks were pay-per-glass, and at $4 a beer, $5 a wine, considering we had paid $40 for the banquet -- I felt that was a bit, well, objectionable to say the least.
Eventually though they did finally end it (as I promise I will do with this marathonic post) and let us go free, whereupon I realized that my peeps had already left. I took this as a lesson in life -- stoicism is all well and good, but at some point it's okay to get up and leave if you're really fed up. Unless you're dining with the king, I suppose, which by the way was one of the yardsticks of my childhood, or so I seem to remember. "Would you act like that at the dinner table if you were dining with the king?", my mother would chide me. Well I bet our king wouldn't make you pay for drinks by the glass, for starters.
Anyway. After that anticlimactic letdown of a banquet, I trudged dejectedly back to my lodgings in the UI student dorms (which kick ass, incidentally, compared to the ones we had at UCL) to pack my bags and catch a precious few winks (maybe 3 hours, tops) before my 7 am departure the next morning.
So finally we come to the "bad travel" part of this post. The lengthy diatribe that precedes served mainly to show why, although I had had a very nice stay in Moscow, I was attacking my day of travel with an unrested body and a surly disposition.
Arriving at Spokane airport after the expected 2 hour bus ride (have I mentioned that I suffer from motion sickness in busses?) I printed out my boarding pass (having checked in online the day before), checked my luggage quickly and efficiently, then made my way through security with very little trouble. Just a minor delay as the security people booted up my laptop to see if it was real and not a bomb disguised as a computer, I suppose. So far so good. Things were definitely looking up. Entering the waiting lounge, I located a decent-looking food place and, responding to my empty stomach's cries of distress, ordered breakfast.
Then the trouble started. What do I hear on the public address system but a mangled version of my name, followed by some indistinct request. For a fleeting moment, I thought hey, maybe Delta's bumping me onto an earlier flight! Wouldn't that be cool?!
Yes it would, but no it wasn't. After apologizing to my waitress and putting my breakfast order on hold (cue anguished gurgling from my midsection), I spent an indeterminate amount of time running around trying to get a hold of someone who would know what I was supposed to do. That's when I learned that even security personnel don't have a direct phone line to the airlines, and if there's no plane about to take off or land, airlines don't bother having ANY staff AT ALL in the terminal area.
Eventually I had to go all the way back out to the Delta check-in desk (still without a clue why) and there I was greeted by a grinning Delta staffer who called out "Geraldine?" as I approached. OK, first off, I'm no snob but I am a Northern European, and I don't appreciate the first-name-basis. I don't care that my last name is a bit difficult to pronounce, I'm a paying customer and I expect to be treated with professionalism.
Hmph. Turns out that security just wanted to inspect my suitcase, but I had put a lock on it and they needed my key. Hah. This is one of those TSA-approved locks that are especially designed so that airport security can open them with skeleton keys or whatever that they're supposed to have everywhere. Well, except in Spokane, WA, apparently. Argh. I hand over the key, they take their own bloody time with it -- I'm trying not to think about them going through my stuff -- and after maybe ten minutes the guy comes back with it, hands it back to me still grinning and wishes me a nice day. Not a word of apology, mind you. I shoot him my best "Die, scumbag" look (which probably looks much less intimidating in reality than it does in my mind) and stalk off to go back through security.
Well yeah, I have to go through security all over again, still carrying laptop, poster tube etc. And of course this coincides with the arrival of a busload of civilians (i.e. people who are not used to flying and/or airport security) AND coffee break time for half the secutirty staff so there's only one lane open. It takes effing forever of course, I'm starving more than ever and I'm still all upset by the whole affair --enough to be visibly agitated, with all the hallmarks of the terror suspect (except, perhaps, the bushy beard): flushed, nervous and breathing fast. So of course security pulls me over. I get to go stand in the (possibly shatter-proof) Glass Cage of Shame and get my palms swabbed, and while they're running the swabs through what looks like a spectrophotometer, I'm standing there trying to remember whether I touched anything in the lab at UI that would lead to a loud beeping, maybe a red light flashing and lots and lots of yelling.
Verdict: no beeping, no flashing, no yelling. Yay me for not being a terrorist after all (orange is SO not my color).
After a mercifully brief inspection of my carry-on belongings, I am finally allowed through security and make my way back to the food place in the lounge area. Breakfast, at last!
The remaining fifteen hours that I then spend waiting in and out of airplanes and airport lounges are rather less eventful. There are a few more hiccups, but nothing major. No missed connections, no lost luggage, only endless tedium between flights (alleviated in Salt Lake City airport by local beer, the only redeeming feature --along with geology-- of Utah), chronic inflight discomfort, social anxiety due to crowding (my innate quorum sensing system is badly calibrated), and the inevitable insultingly small packets of peanuts.
I really like Moscow, ID, but getting there and back is a total pain in the anatomy.
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