Romantic Roads

♫Datdat, dat, dat… DatDat, Dat, Dat… DATDAT, DAT, DAT… DATDAT, DAT, DAT… ♫

” Babe, it’s time to get up,” she says in her tired, awakening voice.

“Nu, uh,”

This is my limited deadpan response. I’m trying to get in a few more seconds of sleep after just a couple of hours of nightcapped anxiety filled sleep. Having the “Did you set the alarm, or did you not?” internal mind game going on throughout the night. If I check the alarm then the phone light will go on, waking up my slumbering partner, but then also making it harder for me to get back to sleep. But, then I’ll know the alarm is set. But then I’ll be awake. So the alarm goes unchecked, and thus the game continues.

“No, really, we need to go,” her voice impressing the beginning hurriedness of the day.

“Nu, uh… sleepy, sleepy”

Lights on. Blinding. It’s 4 a.m. or maybe it’s 2 a.m., depending on which day or city, and how the airlines want to torture us, or how sadistic we are to ourselves being so far from the airport, needing to wake up this early to be there on time. Nestling into my protected pillow fort does nothing for me anymore, she knows this trick and how to bypass it. I know what’s coming, things are still strewn about waiting for me. It’s Travel Day, and off to the airport we go.

It seems like a measurable standard now, so much so that it feels like we’ve become adept at Travel Day. Excessive and successive amounts of travel lead to Travel Day’s definition, which is disliked by most nomadic and vagabond breeds. But I am sure it extends to all mortals who travel in some way or another.

Sleep on the plane, that’s the plan now that I’m awake. Sometimes a quick shower to wake up, sometimes there is no time. Some bags are packed, some not. Jog through the bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and bathroom, grabbing all the items that we thought were packed, or plugged into outlets, and shove them into the crevasses of the already packed bags.

Walk the same rooms two or three times, reminding myself that it’s all packed. Wait, no, what’s that? There’s that one little corner of something-something that was looked over. Reopen the locked and packed luggage, and find another crevasse in the already overpacked bag. Re-walk the rooms.  

The Ride

Call a driver. Load the luggage into the trunk. Does the driver help? Does the driver not help? Does the driver just pop the hatch and expect the best from his hurried passengers to get their own bags into the trunk, which is full of miscellaneous car parts, boxes, shoes, or other questionable objects.

Make a quick contextual friend with the driver, then never talk to them again. Or don’t make that quick friend and hope they don’t kidnap you because you didn’t add them to the contextual friend list of people you’ll never talk to again.

The car types range from the standard plain jane, never had a muddy shoe in it, clean white glove, limo type sedan (Paris). To the cheap government cigarette tar covered, ripped seat, pass out car sick smell, think you’re going to be kidnapped, and dropped off dead in a dank back alley kind of car. (The latter is really in my imagination not a factual experience, or so that’s what I’ll tell Amity’s mom.)

Then there is the in between, the classic party car or van with the interior disco lights, lit up floor boards, and decorated dashboards. This is my favorite, as the car usually matches the personality of the driver, and both can be entertaining on the way to the next stress point of the travel day.

Except for the red floor disco black van that picked us up at 2 a.m. in Istanbul. That driver borrowed the disco fever van from a “friend”. That driver seemed too normal to be driving what his friend had given him. Can’t be too careful with people like that.

The Airport

Get dropped off at the curb and say thank you and goodbye to your new contextual friend. Go inside and find the check-in line. Wait 30 minutes to a few hours in line for the check-in line to move. Shove the bags forward every few minutes while balancing the little bags on top of the big bags. Repeat the latter part each time the bags are moved forward.

Try not to make full eye contact with the fellow passengers, but just enough to see who is on the flight and make up imaginary tales of why they are flying this day. Finally, get to the end of the line at the check-in counter waiting point, and then be called to the check-in person.

Small talk with the lady or man about our travel, practice our newly learned local country words or phrases, and hand over our passports. Set bags on a conveyor or scale to be weighed, 23 kilos plus or minus a few half kilos. The new unmanned bag check-ins are unfortunately more exact. If dealing with travel staff, the bags get nimbly tagged with white stickers that have black barcodes and the destination airport’s three letter code. One large, long sticker wrapped around the bag handle, and a smaller rectangular one for pick-up at the next airport’s baggage claim. These black and white tags have so far been good luck for us in getting the bags to our destination. I say good luck, some may say technology.

We’re then given our passports back, with the boarding pass tucked into the small blue book. Security is always fun, today we played rock, paper, scissors to see whose bag would be knocked off the main conveyor belt and directed to the hand search conveyor. Scissors and rock, I called scissors, my bag got knocked. Usually it’s nothing, and today was one of those days. But previously, it was a forgotten bottle of the best sunscreen ever made, a medical knife, a something-something that I forgot.

Leave security, less the forgotten something-something, for the food court, which can sometimes come after the security. A hub of voices, sliding squeaky chairs, laughter, dishes clanking, conversation, overhead automated speaking, languages, so many languages. The visual sea of families with kids, single travelers, new lovers, old lovers, lovers content with the people that sit across from themselves. It’s a spectacular people watching area.

Then the next wait, the gate to the plane. In general, to make ourselves suffer like a bad session of masochism, we get the economy seats, which means waiting in line for longer periods in front of the gate, to then be rushed into the passenger boarding bridge to wait again while fellow passengers figure out how to stow their carryon items of luggage and seat nesting comforts.

We are not immune to this, we have our own bags and creature comforts that add to the wait of passengers behind us. Once seated and taxiing down the runway, followed by liftoff, I brace myself for Amity’s now familiar hand or arm grab as the plane hits the takeoff turbulence.

As we climb into the sky, the stress of the morning fades, and a respite comes during the flight until landing at the next destination. The thought of the next destination as a whole, brings excited anticipation and not just the anxiety of the travel day. Sure, that anxiety will be there in force as we exit the plane and start finding our new way around, but that’s just a small part of adventuring. The maze and tension of Travel Day is worth it for what it can bring next.