(written on the 20th and 25th from notes taken previously)
Well, today was a 42-hour April 20th. 😉
They-two of those hours were spent either in airports or on planes, with not a single leg of the trip going as planned. 🙃
But I’ll get there…
Let’s see… I was up early, as you might imagine on the morning of a really big trip. Since I already had everything packed up, there wasn’t really anything I needed to do. I did put some trash in the trash can that was nearby, compressing it a bit to make room.
After doing my best to close my doors gently and leave quietly (most people still hadn’t emerged from their vans, as it was pretty early), I swung by the other side of the big green space (where I’d accidentally gone yesterday), and availed myself of both the bathroom and the recycling bin. 🙏
I also bid a farewell to my trusty 10-liter pee bottle! 🙃
While in the park, I took some pictures of the park and then some goodbye pictures of my little van. 🥺
I was supposed to pick up the buyer at his place at 8:00, but I was late leaving the park by about 20 minutes, and then with a fair bit of traffic, ended up being somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes late to his house.
I had also hoped to have more gas in the tank than what I ended up having. I had hoped to leave him with at least a quarter of a tank, but it was probably about 1/8th. 😅
Though I was able to pick him up, and everything seemed to be going relatively well in terms of the sale going through, I was still a bit nervous, because he wanted to transfer ownership before he actually handed me the money. 😅
When I asked if he had the money, he said yes and sort of patted his pocket, but it was still concerning. We were able to do the transfer of ownership online (so much simpler than the lengthy process we have to go through in the United States. There are no titles to sign and submit. It’s done in an instant), and gratefully, he did pay me, but not before trying to shame me into giving him $50 for gas.
I despise that “negotiating” tactic. Which way to get my blood hot. Sure, it is a courtesy to leave a decent amount of gas in the tank for the buyer. I had hoped there for more at the completion of the sales process (which happened while I was driving to the airport 🙃), but… no. He tried to shame me into dropping the price lower a few days ago, and here we were again.
I don’t mind negotiation. But be respectful. If the seller says no, that’s the end of it. You respectfully either buy it for the seller’s lowest offer, or you thank them and leave. You don’t try to shame them.
Nor for gas. 😒
Anyway, I was grateful to have the money. It was a pretty big slap to lose that much, but it is what it is. It’s better than nothing.
Once at the airport, I unloaded my stuff, and headed in, but I was so early that the airline counter wasn’t yet open for my particular airline and flight. I was grateful for the employee, who I think was an employee of a different airline? Who went out of her way to help me figure out that I was just simply too early. 🙏
There wasn’t really any decent place to wait downstairs, so I headed upstairs to a sort of lounge /lobby type area with restaurants and what not. It’s the way you go to go through security anyway, but I was using it as a place to kill time.
Unfortunately, the bathroom was closed for cleaning, so I had to wait for that, but I just hung out at one of the tables and worked on my journal-writing efforts.
Was grateful that it wasn’t too long before the bathroom was free, and then I parked myself at a charging bar, sitting on a bar stool with all of my stuff laid out and my cell phone plugged in to charge.
Check in for the flight began 3 hours before it departed, so I kicked it there sitting on the stool and working on my journal and what not until check-in opened up, and then I headed downstairs, used the automated kiosk to print baggage sticker, which was a little confusing when the sticker came apart in four different pieces (by design), which I wasn’t sure what to do with. 😅
So I attached each of the three leftover pieces to my phone case, just in case they needed to be scanned for some reason, dropped my bag off, and headed on my way back up to security.
For whatever reason, something in my backpack triggered a security check, but the person in charge of doing the check, didn’t open up my bag, but simply looked on her screen and was satisfied that she didn’t need to open up my bag, so I was off to my gate.
Unfortunately, there weren’t cell phone charging outlets attached to the rows of seats in waiting areas at each gate like many airports have, just a few outlets on the walls. I tried to plug in to charge at an outlet in my waiting area, but neither of the plug openings had power, so after a kind cleaning lady tried to help, I ended up parking my little butt on the ground in the walkway sitting against the wall at an outlet that actually was functional.
While sitting there, I noticed that my spine was really unhappy, a lot worse than normal, which didn’t bode well at all for my long long travel day.
And that was thinking everything was going to go normally.
It didn’t. At all. 😅
We boarded the first flight on time, my seat in the very last row, and I sandwiched between two German girls on my left and a Kiwi on her way to London on my right.
But after boarding, we just sat there on the tarmac… waiting. Apparently, a thunderstorm had rolled in while I had been hanging out in the airport, and all the flights were grounded for lightning.
After about an hour of waiting, we were finally able to take off and get in the air.
Delay #1.
The flight to San Francisco was rough on my nerve issues. Probably the worst flight I’ve ever had aside from the one I had immediately following pudendal neuralgia treatment in San Francisco many years ago, flying back from San Fran to Seattle. That one was pretty brutal, but it was a quick flight.
This flight was 12 hours plus, and it was brutal.
Being the embarrassed, awkward human that I can sometimes be, I hate asking people to move so I can get up, so for the entire 12-hour flight, I only left my seat once. 😶
And that… might have actually been much more than just an uncomfortable mistake. 😬
But I’ll get to that… 😅
Though I was not wanting to fall back into watching movies and TV and what not, 13 hours (including the delay) is a really really really long time to kill just sitting there, so I watched some movies. 😅
One of the movies that I watched was Jurassic Park Rebirth. I remember seeing a trailer for it that made it look truly atrocious. I wasn’t wrong.
How on Earth could Steven Spielberg attach his name to that horrendous movie? I don’t even know how many times during the movie I thought to myself how awful it was. 😆 I almost turned it off, but I was like, you gotta at least finish it.
So bad. 😆
I’m so easy to please, but it was… bad.
After that horrible debacle of a movie, I put on top gun Maverick, a movie that I’ve already seen and really really liked, and it was exactly the opposite experience: Time and time again throughout the movie, remember thinking how incredibly well done the movie was– the scene transitions, the character development, the acting, everything… I just… I really like that movie.
And what a stark contrast to the garbage I had just watched. 😆
Jurassic Park, the original, is on my list of best movies of all time, and I actually liked some of the Jurassic World movies as well. But this one… 😆.
Talk about a way to kill a franchise.
I hear rumor that they’re working on Top Gun 3. Let’s hope they don’t ruin it. 🤞
I don’t remember what else I watched besides those two movies. There were definitely others because I only slept for maybe 2 hours? Of the long flight.
So. much. pain.
And so. much. talking.
I don’t know what his deal was, but whoever the crew member was who made the announcements made announcements seemingly every 30 minutes for the whole flight. And that might not be an exaggeration . 😆
And he didn’t just give a brief announcement, no… he would ramble on and on and on.
It was like he just liked the sound of his own voice. 😅
And when the captain would hop on the intercom and make an announcement, for whatever reason, this person felt the need to repeat what the captain said nearly every single time–taking twice, maybe even three or four times the amount of time to say it. 😅
When you’re trying to watch a movie, and the intercom interrupts your audio feed and pauses your movie at every. single. announcement, boy, do they get old quickly. 😅
Toward the end of the flight, I finally started chatting a little bit with the lady sitting on my right, a school teacher who had been visiting home in New Zealand but whose teaching job was actually in London, And was heading back for one more year of teaching.
The two young German girls on my left kindly offered me some of their food, as they were vegan and weren’t going to eat the roll that had butter on it, I don’t think, or something like that. I forget exactly what it was.
I haven’t been as strict vegan, although I’m still an aspiring vegan. 🙃
I just haven’t had the bandwidth do the hard work, so though I rarely eat meat of any kind, I’ve certainly been eating dairy on quite the regular basis.
That’s still one of the areas of cognitive dissonance I’ve got hanging out there in my brain. 😅
My layover in San Francisco was supposed to be about 5 and 1/2 hours. If I remember correctly, the plane was supposed to leave about 12:25 for Salt Lake City.
I grabbed my bag from baggage claim, went through customs, and then waited in their line to recheck my baggage.
Gratefully, though the line was super long, it actually went relatively quickly. I did forget to cinch my pack straps back down, so my waist straps and shoulder straps weren’t clipped together. Gratefully, when I picked my bags up at the end of the day (which would be a heck of a lot later than was originally anticipated, and I’m about to get to that 😅), My pack wasn’t damaged at all, or at least I didn’t notice any damage to it (not that I was actually checking… 🤔).
My boarding pass didn’t have a gate number listed on it, and I couldn’t find my flight on the screens anywhere, so I went to the information desk, and the kind gentleman let me know which gate I was at, as there was another flight still yet to leave at that particular gate. No surprise and since it was a 5 and 1/2 hour layover.
Well… It was supposed to be a 5 and 1/2 hour layover.
So I went through security, wandered over to the gate, parked my little butt on the ground for a while because all of the charging stations were taken, and then once one of the stations was available, I hopped on over and started charging my stuff back up.
As I sat there charging my stuff and working on my journal writing, he was going to Fresno. Then I heard something about somebody’s flight to Reno being canceled as well. 🤔
I didn’t really think a whole lot of it, but when I got up for my station, I think I needed to take a bathroom pit stop, when I went over to the big flight information screen that was next to the bathrooms, my flight was listed as canceled as well.
😶
I don’t think it was long after I saw it on the big screen that I got a text message from United Airlines letting me know that my flight had been canceled, and I’d been rebooked.
Except I wasn’t rebooked to Salt Lake City, I was rebooked to Los Angeles. 😶
Ummm…
So I went up to a United Airlines worker at a different gate’s desk to see what I could figure out. There was a lady ahead of me who was in the same boat. We were supposed to been on the same flight together, and she was trying to figure out what on Earth was going on.
Basically, we’ve both been rebooked to Los Angeles, and then we were going to be taking another flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. So instead of getting into Utah about 3:00 in the afternoon, the new time was going to be 10:00 p.m.
Lovely.
The lady behind the desk was really nice, though, and offered to comp each of us a $15 lunch voucher for use at one of the restaurants in the airport, so we could order some food without it being on our own dime.
That was nice. 🙏
I think my new flight was supposed to leave at about 2:10, so it was roughly an additional 2-hour layover.
Oh well. Could be worse.
After finding my gate, I ended up hanging out on the floor near the bathrooms, as there was an outlet there. I think it was while I was sitting there that my new flight had an update that it was delayed. I think the first delay was something like 15 minutes, being delayed from 2:10 to 2:25.
As I was sitting on the ground, I noticed something odd, my leg was tingling a little bit, and when I went to touch my leg, parts of it were numb.
😶
Just asleep maybe?
Nope nope.
I moved around thinking that blood would go back into where it was supposed to, and I’d have feeling again, but no.
😳
What the…
😬
Needless to say, I was a tad concerned. Not crazy concerned, but definitely a little concerned.
I tried doing some stretches and what not, but no matter what I did, the numbness wouldn’t go away.
And then the flight was delayed again…
And again…
And again.
😶
I don’t remember at which point in time during the many delays I went and got lunch, but at some point I stopped over at a Chinese restaurant and ordered the special. I ended up paying something like $4.xx more than my voucher, but I didn’t mind at all. The food was decent, and I was stuffed to the gills when I finished. 🙏
I think we finally got off the ground at something 4:30ish? I don’t remember for sure.
Once again, I was in the middle seat. Three flights. Three middle seats. I guess that’s what I get for not paying extra to choose which seat I want. 🙃
The woman sitting in the window seat next to me, was quite attractive, but she went right to sleep. 🙃 The other woman sitting in the aisle seat spent the flight working on her computer.
During the flight, the woman in the window seat was asleep when the snack cart came by, so I snagged an extra snack and tried to put it on her tray table, but I couldn’t get the tray table to sit flat. Not wanting the snack to just fall on the ground, I just kept it on my tray table and waited for her to wake up to give it to her.
Eventually, she woke up, and I gave it to her, and she thanked me for it. I then spent a little while chatting with the business lady to my right about her work and what she was doing. She was heading to Los Angeles on business but didn’t really want to be going.
Then I struck up a conversation with the woman in the window seat, and we chatted for the rest of the flight. She was heading to Los Angeles having been invited to attend the Hollywood premier of the new Michael Jackson documentary movie with all the actors and media and everyone.
With the flight running late, she was going to need to change into her fancy clothes in the airport bathroom and grab an Uber.
Super cool girl. She’s an attorney from New York but doesn’t want to do that for more than 5 or 10 years. Then she wants to start a restaurant out in the country, sort of green, homesteading restaurant? She mentioned having goats.
We had a great conversation, and she was super engaged during the conversation, and super cool, so despite my rather disheveled, unappealing appearance (sweatpants, more grubby shirt, greasy hair… 😅), I asked for her number, and she gave it to me.
She and I talked until the flight ended. We touched down harder than I’ve ever experienced in my life. It sounded like maybe the landing gear had broken off as we hit the runway, but we didn’t skid the rest of the way, so I’m not sure what made the super loud noise and jolt.
I had hoped to walk with her as we got off the plane, but I totally spaced the fact that I had my backpack in the overhead bin, so as we were walking down the aisle, I had to stop and go back to get it as she continued off the plane.
Oh well.
I walked to my new gate to wait for my flight which was going to leave I think around 8:00. While I waited, I sent the woman a light-hearted text, so I guess we’ll see if she ever replies. She hasn’t yet.
Not that anything would ever come of it anyway, but I suppose in a way it’s good practice for me. 😅
The layover in Los Angeles was relatively short, which was nice, compared to the others, and it seemed as though everything was going to go smoothly from there on out, as we boarded on time and seemed good to go.
Until we weren’t. 😆
Sitting there on the tarmac, we got the message that there was going to be a 10-minute delay because they had found a missing screw somewhere and needed to get it replaced.
That 10-minute delay turned into a 30-minute delay which eventually turned into a 60-minute delay before we finally got off the ground. 🙃
Apparently, it wasn’t just a missing screw: it was a screw or bolt that it actually broken off and had to be drilled out or something like that, and then they had to do the paperwork before they could let us go.
In the meantime, I sat in a cluster of a bunch of people who had all been traveling all day like I had. There was a couple one row behind me and on the other side living in and having left from Melbourne, Australia who were heading to Utah to visit family, the husband from Australia and the wife from Scotland, and I spent a good while chatting with them.
I also chatted a little bit with the young lady behind me, I think she was maybe a 19-year-old or 20-year-old from New Zealand who was heading to Utah to visit friends for a little while before heading to, believe it or not, Arkansas to work at a youth camp, or something like that. It was her second year doing it out there. She had been traveling from New Zealand, just like I had.
The couple ride across the aisle from me also joined the conversation, they having been traveling all day starting in Cairo, Egypt. Going backward. I think they went from Cairo, to London, to Los Angeles, heading back to Utah.
Turns out the husband was a wood shop teacher and knew my junior highwood shop teacher. Cool stuff.
We all talked pretty much throughout the delay and throughout the entire flight. Talking about traveling and all of our various adventures and plans.
That last flight was definitely the best of the three. 😊
I had arranged to be picked up by my brother Richard, and though I was super late, it worked out decently well, as he was out performing his role as the unofficial neighborhood/ward handyman and finished just in time to swing by to grab me from the airport.
He actually came walking in, to my surprise and delight. Kind of fun, as I figured I was going to be meeting him on the curb like I always meet everybody when I get picked up.
Gratefully, he carried my big pack, and then we headed out to dinner. I had invited him to a late lunch earlier, but with all the delays, it turned into a super late night dinner, but Denny’s was open in Murray, so we drove down to Murray, spent the next couple hours eating and yacking, before he dropped me off at my friend Cory’s house in Millcreek.
Thx, brother! 🙏
Was great to hang out with him for a good little while.
I think it was somewhere around maybe 1:15 or 1:30 when I got there, and with my exhaust having busted off when I was in Arkansas last time, I didn’t dare fire my van up, as it would wake the whole darn neighborhood. 😅
So I crawled into bed, and then spent the next hour and a half on my phone winding down a bit. I don’t know if it’s the dust or the dry air or both, but my nose stuffed up I think within minutes of being in my van.
I’ve been up for… I think maybe 38 1/2 hours (well, I guess I probably got a couple of hours of sleep on my first flight, so maybe that doesn’t count).
Long, crazy day.
It’s a little nutty to think I’ve already gone there and back again.
Six months, gone in a flash… And now I’m back in Utah. 😶
🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 