Broadsheet

I'm only catching up on the weekend's postings now. I wanted to express my deepest sympathy for the fact that you are now the owner of two of the most miserable travel experiences I've ever heard. They round out a list that includes my aunt and uncle's flight on a plane transporting a corpse that had somehow managed to break the airtight seal that had been keeping it out of the recirculated air stream, and my own Christmas Break bus trip from school in Massachusetts back home to Maryland that took 24 hours and a night sleeping on my luggage in the Port Authority bus terminal in New York. May you experience relaxation that borders on divine out on Tangier Island.

 

Thanks for the sympathy, but that corpse story sounds just awful! I had my share of "sleeping in terminals" stories from college. I went to school in Wisconsin, and always had to fly through O'Hare at Xmas when snow would shut everything down....

 

Ok, here's a travel trevail for y'all, in two parts, with preface:

PREFACE: It is August of 1991 and I am preparing to decamp from Chapel Hill to return for one last manic semester at Iowa State prior to moving to the fair city of Balt. My roommie Idelber and I have capucino from nine to midnight or so with a friend in Durham and then hit the road northbound, on a doctoral program tour for Idelber. We make it into DC around five and, not wanting to grab a hotel for just a few hours we park right on the Ellipse and stumble out onto the hill leading up to the Washington monument in those carefree days of the early nineties. Light rain wakes us late in the morning, after which we wonder around museums and catch a fantastic Lou Reed show at Constitution Hall.

PART THE FIRST: I arrange one grad school interview on the trip, with a prof in the Sociology of Technology doctoral program at Penn. Alas, fifteen minutes prior to the interview, I relieve myself sitting on what I inexplicably fail to notice is a handicapped toilet, thereby urinating on my beige Dockers. Taking this as a sign, I simply skip the interview. Sometimes one takes the piss, sometimes one gives . . . .

PART THE SECOND: We arrive a week or so later in Ithaca, seeking lodging on a midweek summer's night. But the inns, it seems, are all full. We head out -- I'm pretty sure this is true -- Route 13 where we find a semi-ramshackle motor lodge known as the Wonderland Inn (cue the Big Country music). We walk in. "Do you have any rooms?" "No sorry, no rooms....Wait a minute, are you guys gonna go back into town for awhile after you check in?" "Uh, yeah....why?" "Well, we have this room where a guy just had a heart attack and it's a little . . . messy. He and his wife were there." "Are they out now?" "Well, mostly. He's sort of, well, dead, but they've gone to the emergency or whatever." "And the room is . . . .?" "Well, that kind of thing can be messy; there are some stains on the floor, but I can get them cleaned up if you leave me your luggage and pick it up when you come back."

Idelber and I look at each other. Ithaca is rather a ways from anywhere else so we say yes. When we get back, there is still the smell of vomit on the floor and there is an even more graphic reminder of the incident where the man apparently clenched the room's metal window blinds with both hands. We both go to bed quickly, trying to ignore the smell. I awake in the middle of the night with flies crawling on my lips.

 

Mark: The first one is SO YOU!! The second one - ewwwww! And finally - get a blog dammit. Hope your Dad is doing better today.

 

Mark,
when your comments are that long and involved, it IS in fact time to get a blog.
Broadsheet can speak that from experience :-)

(BS: have a FABU time!!)

 

Dang, I wanted to read your take on Canada's Maritimes...hope the rest of your vacation goes more hunky-dory.

 

Jeez, and here I thought there was something romantic and no-direction-homish about piecing together an existence in the comments. I mean, isn't that what any self respecting Tom Waits character would do, if said character inclined to blogs? Ok, sorry, I mix musical allusions.

I suppose I'll get the blog thing going again sometime this fall. I may have to take the Steve-ish route and do a work-ish/wonk-ish one and a personal one; we'll see.

That's all for tonight, from (not far off) a long and lonesome highway/east of Omaha/ listening to the [er, air conditioner]/ rolling out its one lone song....