Saturday, October 13, 2007—Lost and Found and Lost
I rose early enough the next morning to find my way to the next phase of the conference. I’m not going to use a great deal of space here this time, as I’d rather leave the storyline predominantly for Jennifer to complete.
Solitary ‘Berry in SanAn
“I had decided before we left home that I wanted to see the San Antonio Botanical Garden. It’s not something Thomas would be very interested in, so it seemed like a good solo activity. All in all, it was fun, but like any travel adventure, it was not without its mishaps, nor its vacas (cows).
First, I had to figure out how to navigate the bus system. I had printed out some information before I left home, but being the skeptic that I am, I didn’t trust it, so I asked a friendly hotel employee at the front desk for some help. After a phone call to the bus company, he told me that the first step was to find the bus stop on Blanco Street, which was “right down there, at the stoplight.” So … of course, I walked a-a-a-l-l-ll the way around the block, drawing a blank on Blanco, before I finally spotted it. Unfortunately, I had missed the bus time I had written down. Rather than risk going off without proper information, I went a-a-a-l-l-ll the way back up to our little executive lounge and looked it up on the Internet, but of course that wouldn’t let me download PDFs of the bus routes. So I called the friendly customer service person at the bus company, got the rundown, set off back down to Blanco Street and caught my bus.
Luckily, the bus drivers were very tolerant of me when I told them I was a tourist and wanted to be sure of where to get off to make my transfer. They were glad to help me out, and I got to the Botanical Garden without further mishap.
There I was, the Botanical Berry, dancing among the trees and plants. I’ll not bore you with a detailed rundown of what I saw, but some of the highlights are worth noting. One was a Japanese garden, which had a nice little rock pond running through it, bamboo plants and shady trees. I also enjoyed the sensory garden, meant specifically to give the blind a full botanical experience. However, there was still plenty to see, touch and smell. I made my way up to the overlook, where I got a nice panoramic view of San Antonio, and wandered through the rose garden, which had plenty of beautiful colors and scents.
The main lowlight was the muchas vacitas, or ‘many little cows.’ There was a family with a herd of small calves ambling through the Japanese garden. It was a nice, tranquil place, and my peace was quickly destroyed by the shrill lowing from the young ones.
[ABOVE]: Having captured the alien pod during our trip to Biloxi in July 2004, [BELOW]: Jennifer finds another otherworldly flora in San Antonio in October 2007.
There was also some sort of Dora the Explorer maze through the formal garden, which was rendered all but unusable by me, the full-sized adult, who could not crawl through the little three-foot-high metal obstacles that had been placed in the walkways. I cursed the fact that a formal garden had been turned into a playground for kids, shrugged my shoulders and turned to get to my bus, which was due in just a few minutes.
I gazed at my bus schedule for the return trip and calculated that I would either just barely make my transfer bus, or have to wait twenty-eight of the thirty minutes between buses. Being a Thornberry, of course, I was betting on the longer wait. Once again, the friendly driver helped me get off at the right place. I settled myself in for half an hour on the hot, sunny bench, when what to my wondering eyes did appear but bus number two, minus the reindeer. I got back to the room a little early, a few minutes ahead of Thomas.
And now, back to Thomas’ narration to take you through the rest of the story!”
Riverwalk the Line
Jennifer and I once again stared doe-eyed at each other as we respectively told of our experiences above in bone-chilling, mind-expanding detail. Then came the decision of how to spend our last evening in San Antonio. Personally, I was prepared to just settle into the hotel and avail ourselves of its many amenities. We had sporadic access to email, so I didn’t feel quite so cut off from friends and family as in past trips (that’s you folks!), so we could have done much to communicate. Jennifer, however, wanted to venture out into the city and see the Paseo del Rio: the San Antonio Riverwalk. I was hesitant because we calculated that based on the bus ride and time to dine, we’d only really get thirty minutes of time at the Riverwalk before the last bus run that would bring us home.
I had to admit though, that my position in the discussion was causing me a touch of “existential guilt.” Basically, existential guilt is the sense of malaise one experiences when she or he is not living up to her or his full potential during a lifetime that goes ‘round only one time (unless you’re Hindu or Buddhist, I suppose). It is the sense of lost time and lost opportunity. En micro, I did sort of relate to Jennifer’s point that we had traveled more than a thousand miles to see the city, and it would be an opportunity lost if we hung around the room. So with her wanting to go and my wanting to stay, we compromised; we decided to go. ;)
As Jennifer’s account above indicated, she had previously scoped out the bus system, and she was confident we would be able to get out to the Riverwalk and back again without mishap. We hiked out to the right stop, climbed aboard the next bus and paid our $2 fee.
Right away, I was a bit unnerved. First of all, the trip was about forty minutes long. Second of all, I started to feel like we had crossed to the wrong side of the tracks somewhere along the way. There weren’t any bars on the windows of the homes we passed, and no one was using handguns with the identification numbers filed off, but the other passengers climbing onto the bus started taking on a considerably rougher, harsher, seedier look.
At one point, we had to vacate our seat because the driver had to flip it up to make that area wheelchair accessible for one of the boarding passengers. Bald and scruffy, the guy looked like he’d jumped onto a grenade to save his biker buddies in a militant gang rumble. The bouquet of roses he was selling made him seem…well, not one bit less intimidating. To the guy’s credit, he never said anything amiss or even talked to us at all. I think he made me nervous because he sat right in front of me and I was able to count the five wedge-like scars cut into the back of his shaved scalp. It looked like he’d gone a few rounds with a steel-beaked woodpecker…and lost.
Another group of passengers aboard included a very young Mexican-American couple. They looked to be around nineteen or twenty-something, and they had a child who appeared maybe two years old. And the girl was very pregnant and shaped like a potato with pencils shoved in the bottom of it for legs. Again, they never said anything to us, but I got the sense that if I had made eye contact, the young man might have taken offense and stabbed me. I cultivated a blank expression and stared past them out the bus window.
At last, the bus reached the right destination, and we stepped off of it to behold downtown San Antonio.
Eh.
Overall, it wasn’t that much different than downtown in other cities we’ve visited. It was characterized by a tangle of descending staircases that take pedestrians down to the famed Riverwalk. When we finally found our way down there, we say this little teeny stream, beside which many couples walked. The Rio Grande, the Paseo del Rio was not. A boat chugged by, stuffed with people and a tour guide. We've found someone else's video of the area at Youtube:
The place was peaceful in its own way, but this area was crawling with “steers” and there really wasn’t anywhere for Jennifer and I to stop and take in the view without having to crowd someone over the side of the concrete railings and into the water below. Tempting, but unwise. At one point, we ran into a cluster of well-dressed Texas “steers” all coordinating some kind of event—a marriage, funeral, save-the-whales karaoke, an Amish live birth—we really didn’t know or care. All we could determine was that they were in the way.
This is not to say it was an entirely unpleasant experience. No, there was nice foliage and flowers around the entire area, with birds flitting around, and the water did have a peaceful sound to it. We could see how it would be a nice hangout for young couples coming out for dating; it was a classy environment that did not take any great amount of money to appreciate. Our regret was that circumstances contrived to keep us from having the time necessary to find a spot and absorb some of it. We’d spent that time on the airport floor, alas.
Our search for food was a painful one. At one point, we found a nice, open doorway into what appeared to be a ritzy place. However, all the servers had disappeared. We waited for several minutes, but no one came back. I stepped further into the place and looked around, but saw no one who looked like an employee. Plenty of customers cramming their pie-holes, but no one to seat us. We gave up and moved on.
Eventually, we found a nice place called the “Iron Cactus.” They had a splendid Mesoamerican décor, a sedate atmosphere and a friendly hostess. We paid attention to none of those features. What we noted was that they could seat us outside and they could do it right now. Good enough for us! The details of the meal are relatively unimportant, save that we split a huge sampler platter of various Mexican dishes, and I generously doused it all with the hottest hot sauce they would give me. A thrill-seeker I am not, and a roller-coaster wimp I am. But among our family and friends, my taste for spice is rivaled by few. The facility served us up a couple of Mexican beers, which I used to wash down my food and the little bits of my tongue flaking away because of the hot sauce. It wuh wurt it!
If one can say “you are what you eat,” then Jennifer and I must have eaten a couple of stuffed Thornberries. Out we toddled, feeling heavy, but also freer and more confident. Not to be outdone, San Antonio then reached out and smacked our heads around backward, so we were looking down at our own butt cheeks (“Why didn’t somebody tell me my ass was this big!?”) That must be how we got lost, because neither of us could find any trace of the bus stop where we first exited to the downtown area. Every direction we went, we ended up further lost. Slowly but surely, our time ran out, and we realized that wherever that damn bus stop was, we had long missed the last run back to the hotel. So we found a safe haven on the stoop of an old friendly hotel chain, the Drury Inn. Settling in for a few minutes, Jennifer pulled out her Plan B: a taxi. Yes, she called a central number and requested a ride. Then we waited for the better part of an hour while every taxi but ours went down the road and picked up everyone but us. I was getting highly agitated by this point, figuring my existential guilt that had bent me down and kicked me onto this excursion might have been preferable to the salient anxiety of being trapped away from our only sanctum sanctorum in a very large and unfamiliar city. Adding to our burden, drunken people kept staggering by to stare at us or ask us in slurry words if we knew were various businesses where located. We didn’t, but I found it easiest just to point in the direction that was the opposite of us.
Finally, our cab arrived. Chunking and wheezing, the vehicle had a sickly green light emerging from inside it and wafts of luminous emerald smoke that puffed out of the cracked windshields. Inside, cloistered in the mysterious front seat was a “scabby cabby” who looked like a pile of dirty laundry with a thatch of gray hair awkwardly plopped on top of it. He spoke in a gravely smoker’s voice and flicked his lizard’s tongue while taking down our location. Then he set about finding the longest, most circuitous route by which to drag out the trip and gouge us for more money. While he meandered, he talked, asking us a few questions about ourselves and where we were from. Along the way, he had time to give us a long lecture about the history of Texas and how there are no public parks in the Lone Star State because the money-starved local government sold it all off to private interests. The Hilton bulking on the Texas skyline never looked so inviting by the time we rolled up to the front door. Scabby Cabby handed us a bill for about $22, or eleven times what we paid to go the same distance by bus. We disembarked from the cab and bolted inside, where we soothed over our jangled nerves with a beer from the hotel café.
The rest of the night was mercifully uneventful. But it had been a long day and we were ready for bed.
Sunday, October 14, 2007—Homeward Bound
The return trip wasn’t nearly as eventful as the story of our arrival. The only notable point was that our departure from the San Antonio airport was actually running early. Or rather, there was room on an earlier flight, and we jumped for the chance because our layover in Houston was only about an hour. We’d already missed one flight from that damnable place. We didn’t want another night with the zombies.
All in all, we got home in one piece. The greatest irony was that when we walked out of our arrival gate in our local airport, we saw that the departing flight from there was going to Newark, and it was—you guessed it—delayed! All Jennifer and I could do was shake our heads at those waiting passengers and think to ourselves: “Fellow travelers, you’re in for a lo-o-o-ong adventure.”
And as always, our darlings, thanks for your time and attention to our narrative!
Yes, Jennifer’s Spanish lessons can give voice to the day in a way my yet-crude Latin cannot.
San Antonio witnessed a plane giving birth to a couple of ripe Thornberries. Yes, other than a futile attempt to wash our faces using the restroom sinks and nearly empty soap dispensers, we weren’t able to do much about our hygiene. All of our supplies were in a cart or the belly of a plane somewhere. We could only hope it was the plane we had just exited.
Fortune finally stopped butt-plungering us at this point. We collected our luggage from the baggage claim without any major mishaps. We located phones to call the Hilton and they dispatched a transport bus. I knew it was going to be a painful trip when I sought to confirm with the driver that we were in the right place, and the little punk said, “I dunno. Are you?” [Sigh]. At this point, I really didn’t care what hotel he found for us, or if he went home afterward and shot himself in the head. All I wanted was a room and delicious sleep.
Our transport driver, demonstrating every bit of his human intelligence level.
Fortunately, I had recommended before we left our home airport that Jennifer call the Hilton and confirm our reservations so they didn’t cancel them. Our room was ready when we arrived and we got the room keys. But before we went up to them, I asked Jennifer for a little more patience while I sought out the ASCH conference people. I’m sure they’ve heard every sob story for why someone misses their scheduled time, so I thought if I presented my ragged, rank, stubbly self exactly as I had walked off the plane after a night in the airport, it might score me a few points. The ASCH assistant took one look at me and told me to go to bed. Happy to oblige.
The Hotel Hilton, Airport
Well, we may have paid 136% and then missed the first night, but somehow, I think we still got our money’s worth. They had placed us on what they called the “Executive Level.” Essentially, it was the top four floors of the hotel. It came with a complimentary access to a study, free breakfast, a computer for getting on the Internet and a team of attractive young, nubile, scantily clad people to perform “escort” services on…er, um…for us. Okay, perhaps not that last one, but they did give us the royal treatment, especially when our only point of reference on this trip was a hard floor plagued by zombies. We had to have our electronic room cards with us any time we got on the elevator because only those with “Executive Access” could get to those upper rooms. Wow. Call us the Throne-berries. Insofar as the room itself, they might have put it on a mountaintop next to a gibbering lama, but the accommodations themselves were comparable to most other hotels where we’ve stayed. Pay-per-view on television, desks, a few complimentary items like bottled water. No liquor cabinet like the J.W. Marriott in Atlanta and no refrigerator like the Drury Inn in St. Louis. Still, that vast king-sized bed was all I had the eyes to peruse. And then neither of us saw anything except our own eyelids….
His and Hers; Hypnosis and Huffing
Jennifer and I woke two hours later, mercifully freshened up and grabbed some food downstairs in the hotel’s café before the conference attendees belly-flopped themselves in front of us. We would later learn that in addition to ASCH, there were a couple of other professional organizations holding conferences. One was a group of well-dressed Pentecostals, singing the praises of the Lord and getting themselves baptized by the active Holy Spirit. The other was a group of naturalists. So the place was crowded, and we just barely squeaked our way in front of one group looking for loaves and fishes and the other for worms and twigs.
Afterward, we went our separate ways, me to finally get to the latter half of the conference, Jennifer to do…whatever it was she did. We’ll split the story off here and let you follow her thread.
Jennifer’s Experiences:
“I spent my afternoon doing what any self-respecting health nut does after spending a night crunched up on an airport floor … I went down to the hotel’s fitness center for a workout. It felt remarkably good to work the kinks out of my muscles. It felt so good, in fact, that I worked my body for almost two hours! That’s much longer than I stay at the gym at home. Not much else to say here, except to comment on how nice the hotel’s fitness facility was. It was equipped with two or three treadmills and stair climbers, a full set of dumbbells, a few benches, and a couple of ab balls. It also had a mat and large mirror, which were very nice for some vigorous yoga poses.
Feeling much better, I went back up to the room to get ready to go out to dinner with Thomas. Despite my swearing not to do so, I dozed off for a short nap, then roused myself and took a shower, got dressed and studied mi espanol until he returned.
Thomas will pick back up with the story of our evening together 'on the town:'”
The North Star Mall
The Hilton Hotel was across the highway from the pretty fairly sized North Star Mall. After Jennifer caught me up on the respective experiences detailed above, we had hopes of moseying over to investigate said mall and grabbing some grub. Originally, we thought we might just cross the highway and walk over, but after several hours in San Antonio, we realized that would be nigh impossible. The highway was multi-lane and heavy with traffic at all times. There was also construction going on, of course. We always seem to visit places that are being built or renovated. Neither of us was keen on the idea of playing a high-stakes game of Frogger where the loser ended up as pink squishy stuff beneath some Texas cowboy’s Good Year treads. That meant waiting for the hotel’s transport van. Fortunately, it arrived right on time and we got there with no difficulty. We had two hours to enjoy ourselves before the van came back for the return trip.
Of course you know there would have to be a stampede of humanity oozing its way around us, so Jennifer and I found ourselves prodding people out of the way or luring them off the main route of the mall with handfuls of fescue and oats. Only a brief exploration of this one-story palette of shopping splats, and Jennifer and I finally realized that it held few options for dining that weren’t in the open food court. We ended up returning to the place way back at the point we had entered, one known as Luby’s. It was basically a buffet place, where you pick up a tray and then tell the glassy-eyed, slack-jawed employees behind the counter which entrees and side dishes you want. I selected a pretty tasty ensemble that was a bit luke-warm, but otherwise palatable. It included ‘shrooms, which generally make any dish, including ice cream, better for me. Jennifer, on the other hand, suffered loud and long. Her dinner looked like someone in the kitchen has pulled the nozzle on it and let all of the air out of it. Flat, bland and roadkill-esque, she wasn’t even able to better it with butter and other condiments because each packet grabbed her plastic knife and forced her to duel it before it would submit to having its splattery viscera pasted on her culinary crap. At least it filled her stomach, even if that was all it did. The mall itself was a vast enterprise, a honeycomb of capitalism that would have Karl Marx rolling around in his 124-year old grave. Overall, it was so filled with shops, restaurants, kiosks, service providers and colorful lights that it would have required a dedicated shopper to spend five or six hours moving through it.
Eh.
Jennifer and I burned through it in about 45 minutes.
We’ve noted in previous narratives that we’re just not big shoppers. Sure, these malls tend to be huge. But once we weed out the chain stores that we have back at home, then go back and throw out the teeny-bopper places with their hot pink thongs and recycled boot-cut low-riders, then scratch off the frivolous places like “Leather ‘R’ Us,” and finally trim out the high-priced places that are affiliates of places we have at home, there really isn’t much left that captures our interest. Jennifer and I mainly just wanted a nice dinner (so much for that), and a coffee from Starbucks. We usually hold out hope for encountering something truly unique at these malls and I did briefly check out a game store. But I found it full of teenage “steers” (as opposed to the “cows” of home), and in general, my X-Box was just too old to run most of what they sold. There was a cheap, “old fogie” rack of games, but they were generally things that were so uninteresting that I remembered why I never bought them years ago.
Oh, there were interesting features in the mall itself. Various places in the court area had cans of food or boxes stacked in such ways that they made neat sculptures.
This "Great Pump'can" sculpture from Mall of America illustrates some the design concept the Travelin' Thornberries saw at the North Star Mall.
One I remember in particular was shaped like a giant stiletto shoe. But otherwise, it was stuff we had seen before, stuff covered with a wall of human Texas beef vast enough to even answer the question of that old woman who worked in Wendy’s commercials back in the mid-1980s.
Several minutes and handfuls of distributed fescue and oats later, we found our way back to the bench outside where we could wait peacefully for the return van to the hotel. Someone else from our hotel sat on the other side of the bench from us, but she was polite enough not to try to make conversation. Or maybe she was put off because I started reciting a never-ending plethora of classical Latin sentences, catching up from the missed time at the airport from the night before. remedium irae est mora! [The cure for anger is delay!]
Texas Beers
What more can we say? We caught the van back and swung by the hotel pub. There, we had a couple of local beers before retiring upstairs. All we did at that point was read a little, skim the television channels and go to bed.
Yes, it has only been a short time since we brought you a narrative summary. Because of circumstances shortly to be explained, Jennifer and I found ourselves crunched into two major trips within only two weeks of each other. If you’re still excited by our last presentation, please, please, do keep your enthusiasm-tacos well hot-sauced as we bring you this upcoming Travelin’ Thornberries adventure!
Forward!
Thursday, October 11, 2007—The Tepid Trip Scenario
Let it be said at the outset, Jennifer and I were neither one particularly excited about this trip. Unlike most of our laboriously planned excursions, this one caused us to feel that it was sort of foisted onto us…or rather, onto me. I had to renew my hypnosis certification this year and had every intention of doing so way back at the beginning of summer. Little did I realize, however, that the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis(ASCH) did not offer any training seminars during the summer because said seminars tend to be poorly attended during those months. So just my luck, I had to request an extension on my certification through October to get me to a point where we could make arrangements to travel to San Antonio for the ASCH workshop there.
A Screw Before We Flew
From the beginning, the trip was fraught with logistical snarls. Part of the situation was clearly my fault. Setting aside, for the moment, that I could have gotten this training last year if I had planned better, I also got horribly pressured by work-related time constraints in the weeks before this trip and waited too long to book our room at the Hilton Hotel. As a result, by the time I called and attempted to make reservations, the hotel attendant told me that the all of their rooms had been filled to capacity. I found it hard to believe that the entire Hilton Hotel was booked solid in the middle of freakin’ October, but there you go. And that meant we’d have to make a reservation at another hotel, where I’d have to try to find transportation over to the Hilton at 7 a.m. each day for the conference. Well, we managed to book a reservation at the considerably more humble Day’s Inn.
As we’ve stated in previous narratives, Jennifer and I do not necessarily feel entitled to opulence in hotel reservations. We just want safety and convenience. So it just often turns out that conferences and places of access to tourist attractions tend to be a little more ostentatious. They’re convenient, but hard on the budget. Staying in a more meager hotel wasn’t a problem for us, and in fact, we liked that it was about a third the price. But that issue of my trying to then get from this hotel to the conference at a different hotel just really cast a pall over our enthusiasm. It didn’t help that all of Jennifer’s attempts online to figure out where our hotel would be in relation to the Hilton kept belching up contradictory information. One Web site would say they were right next to each other; another would indicate they were twenty minutes apart.
Finally, Jennifer declared war on the aforementioned pall looming over this doomed trip, and she committed herself to find something about it to make us eagerly anticipate it. To our surprise, she found at the Hilton’s web site that they did, in fact, still have rooms available. It would have been nice if the hotel had bothered to explain to me that it was only the conference rate rooms that were all full. The hotel still had rooms at their ordinary, albeit much more expensive, rate. So we decided to just swallow the price and get a room in the hotel where the conference was taking place. Hell, we figured it just wouldn’t be worth the hassle for the extra money we might save at the Day’s Inn.
But then Fate said, “Let the screwing continue.” We hurled up the money for the new room, then I called the Day’s Inn to cancel our reservation…and learned that the money we’d already committed there was non-refundable. So the Thornberries prove again that if they get a room for 136% of what anyone else would pay, they might stand a chance of getting 50% of what everyone else would reap. *Snort*
The Usual Plethora of Airport Hassles
I had taken the day off and was largely ready to head out to the airport by the time Jennifer got home. I’m always antsy about getting there with enough time to spare for going through the security checkpoints and finding our gates. We had never missed a flight, so I don’t know why I was so worried. And ultimately, we needn’t have rushed. As soon as we got there and went to check in at Continental counter, we saw that our flight to our layover in Houston was delayed two hours. The registration attendant was kind enough to go ahead and rebook us on a later flight out to Houston so we didn’t miss the connection that would take us on to San Antonio.
With plenty of time to spare, we toddled off to the little airport restaurant called Creative Croissants, where we got a dinner of veggie burgers and fries, along with a couple of tasty beers. When we got back to our gate, we saw that the flight was delayed yet again. Apparently, there was a really bad storm in Newark, New Jersey, one that had grounded the plane we needed to board to get to Houston. Our harried attendant was busily trying to reschedule everyone who walked up to talk with him, explaining over and over again that such “acts of God” were not the fault of the airline and they couldn’t be held responsible.
Jennifer and I went back to the same restaurant and drank more beer.
What made the experience so hard to tolerate was that the gate we were supposed to fly out of was probably the homeliest, most technologically inferior one we had ever seen. Flight times had to be manually slid into and out of an old-fashioned board, one that wasn’t even digital. I think I saw someone deliver chalk or something at one point. So there was no running status report on when the hell our plane was going to take off from Newark and arrive outside our gate. At one point, I heard the attendant say, “Yeah, we all hate this gate.” So that gate was the only one of its type in the entire airport. Lucky us.
Ultimately, our plane would arrive to pick us up four hours later than our original scheduled takeoff time. During the interval, we had the opportunity to get to know a bit about our gate attendant. His name? Mr. Romans. Place of residence? Indianapolis. He commuted several hours to and from work every day. Species? Well, we know for certain that he is not a cow. How do we know this? He told us! Yes, we heard him talking on the phone to someone, making plans for dinner later that night. At one point, he said, “No, I don’t want alfalfa on it; I am not a cow!” Overall, we do have to say that Mr. Romans probably handled the crisis better than anyone else we’ve ever observed. Somehow, he stayed calm, cool and collected, dealing with irate passengers firmly but politely. In the end, though none of us were happy with the delay, he managed to see to it that most of our needs were handled to the furthest extent that was within his power. For us, he predicted that it was increasingly unlikely that we would make the back-up flight that the first attendant had booked us on, and so the next option was the first flight out of Houston on Friday morning. Sucking half the oxygen in the airport in a great heaving sigh, we told him to book us on it, which he cheerfully did.
Thanks a bundle, Mr. Romans!
Houston, We Have a Problem
At this point, we were still hoping against hope that some miracle would intervene and keep us from getting trapped at the airport, but we were growing pessimistic. This first branch of the flight was the longest, at about two hours. Basically, that amounted to about 800 miles, during which we managed to catch a few minutes of sleep. Jennifer showed great foresight by accepting the courtesy snack pack offered by the flight attendant, even though we had eaten a hearty meal and weren’t that hungry. It would end up being a blessing later on.
At last, the plane landed, and we were ready to jump off right away and see if we might still make it to our connector flight. Our hope began to wilt and rot as the plane then taxied leisurely around the runway for what seemed like 30 minutes, basically taking time for the passengers to study the rugged, pitted, worn tarmac. We were able to behold the lush beauty of the painted lines, the elegant symmetry of the orange cones and reflector lights, the glassy-eyed stares of the outside employees, and the impressive way the Texas moonlight reflected off the oily spots leading up to the gate. Oh, Captain, My Captain, may we please de-plane!? Jennifer and I left bloody handprint smears on the seats because we’d long-since chewed our fingernails down to the third knuckles on our hands.
Off the plane at last, we decided to give it the old “college try” and see if we could get to the gate of our connector flight before it took off. We huffed. We puffed. We rode escalators, conveyor belts, a putt-putt steam engine transport, a couple of irate burros and at one point, we crowd-surfed. Both of us were tired, but we were cultivating an attitude of weary acceptance combined with the last dregs of hopeful anticipation.
Wasted energy.
When we finally found our gate, it was empty. Dust devils blew around the seating area, and I stumbled over the bleached skull of a dead steer while trying to avoid an oncoming tumbleweed. Jennifer sat on a cactus. Nothing stirred with the breath of life.
We noticed that an adjacent gate was hustling quite loudly, with the attendants broadcasting the call for tickets in both English and Spanish. The destination of that flight was Caracas, Venezuela. Not knowing what else to do, we went up and asked them about our flight number. The young woman helping out the other passengers gave us the terse, unsympathetic answer, “It’s gone.”
O-ka-a-a-ay...
Since she wasn’t inclined to say anything else, I asked her what we were supposed to do as our next step. She hurriedly printed us up another couple of boarding passes for the next available flight to San Antonio…which was scheduled for take-off in a mere eight hours. [Groan!!] Just to really torture the both of us, I asked Ms. Overly Pencilled Eyebrows what time our original flight left, figuring that with our luck, it was five minutes before we arrived. But no, based on her answer, we calculated that it was probably leaving while our previous plane was touring the beautiful wild-lands of the Houston Airport’s tarmac. And aboard that absentee aircraft, toward the middle of the passenger compartment, were two lonely little seats that were conspicuously empty of buttcheeks belonging to two weary Thornberries. Damn the weather in Newark. }:/
To be fair to Little Ms. Dissertation at the Caracas terminal, and her lengthy explanations, she did give us a flyer outlining options for us to get a cheap motel room for the night. But frankly, we’d already paid for one hotel room we didn’t want, we sure as hell weren’t going to pay for another one. More, after missing one flight, Jennifer and I didn’t want to go to an unscheduled hotel stop via taxi and then risk missing our remaining option the next morning. So we were stuck at an airport that most decidedly was not designed for lengthy stays.
Thus began a surreal experience for the Travelin’ Thornberries.
We’d gone from hurrying frantically to being stuck for the next eight hours with little to do and nowhere special to be. The entire airport was closed down, all of the restaurants and shops folded up, the hallways dark, the spirits of the damned moaning from corridor to corridor.
One of the many haunted corridors at the Huston Airport.
The undead nighttime custodial workers were zombie-like, staggering around with jerky movements, parting their desiccated lips to croak out “brains” each time they spotted our succulent living flesh.
Undead nighttime custodial workers.
Fortunately, they moved very slowly, though annoyingly, and they always seemed to catch up to us wherever we went. Jennifer and I deliberately found a deserted food court that was as far from the undead creatures as we could, and that is where Jennifer brought forth her food bounty she’d stashed away in her cheeks while on the plane, as well as the little water cup from the same source (the plane, that is, not her cheeks). Otherwise, we’d have gone hungry all night.
Alas, the undead eventually caught up to us again, swarming in to try and crack open our skulls with their blackened teeth, so they could devour us from the inside out. Or maybe just to buff the floor. We really did feel like the nighttime crew was following us. At one point, we sat at some chairs in the hallway because there was a wall behind them where I could rest my head. Suddenly, one of the zombies came speeding down the corridor on a luggage cart, stopped abruptly right in front of us, stared at us with its wormy, empty eye sockets…then it turned around in the vehicle and went back the direction from whence it game. Huh? No logic among the living-impaired, I suppose. Jennifer chose a remote restroom in which to freshen up, only to have a couple of undead banshees immediately rope it off while she was in there, and then bang and clang all around her with their blood-freezing wails.
Time began to lose meaning, and my memories of the rest of the night are a jumbled and hazy hodgepodge.
One of the many kaleidoscopic visions running through the skulls of the Travelin' Thornberries, as they suffer through a night of hell.
We found our intended gate, but it was adjacent two loud television sets that were blaring CNN coverage of lemon rinds or something equally intriguing from distant shores. Rather than sit under there and let the commentary brow-beat us, we found a semi-private spot farther away, in a little corner behind a large, concrete pillar. There, we took off our shoes, battened down all of our valuable property and tried to catch a few winks. As I used my shoes for my pillow, I couldn’t help by gnash my teeth at the irony; we’d paid 136% for a room at the Hilton, and instead, we were sleeping on the hard floor of an airport. Arrghhh!!
And again, the zombies found us.
I slept fitfully at best, but two hours passed rather quickly, indicating at least some measure of an alpha-wave state of consciousness. I awoke suddenly to a loud crashing sound, which turned out to be some custodial idiot on a 10-foot ladder, jumping around with it like a pogo stick, trying to repair something in the only bit of ceiling in the entire freakin’ airport that was sure to disturb two barely-dozing Thornberries. Blearily, I realized he’d someday be coming to a pain clinic like my place of employment, where he would have to explain how he fell off of a ladder and busted his pelvis all over Texas because he was too lazy to climb down from it before moving it to another location.
A few more clatter-crash-groan-“brains” and Jennifer and I gave up trying to get any more sleep. Instead, we returned to our own gate. For awhile, we just sat there, counting the spiderwebbing of broken blood vessels in the whites of each other’s eyes and commenting on how terrible we looked. We couldn’t sleep, but we were too tired to concentrate on doing anything else. Latin and Spanish lessons lay fallow in our bag, and fiction books went undevoured. I think I might have made some notes for this narrative during that time, but damned if I remember for sure now. For a while, Jennifer tried to rest her eyes by lying across a row of chairs. I paced, taking periodic glances at the CNN coverage on the televisions. This same commercial kept coming on with a jingle that got stuck in my head…”Parking Cents! Ching Ching!” It had something to do with paying for a parking spot at the airport, but damned if I remember for sure now. Fortunately, my memory isn't necessary. You can view the company at least, here:
More hours slipped fitfully by. The zombies began to descend back into hell. The moaning spirits in the corridors dissipated like smoke, returning perhaps to the nether world between life and death. Store employees began to unlock the various business establishments. The digital gate sign sprang to life, showing our flight number. Mercifully, it was running on time! Jennifer and I stared with glazed expressions, our tongues lolling from our faces, as another hour passed. When they opened the gate, we giggled. When they called our ticket row, we cried. When the plane took off, we crossed our eyes and participated in an orgiastic fit that was midway between yodeling and barking. The sky never tasted so good.
There I was, the Botanical Berry, dancing among the trees and plants. I’ll not bore you with a detailed rundown of what I saw, but some of the highlights are worth noting. One was a Japanese garden, which had a nice little rock pond running through it, bamboo plants and shady trees. I also enjoyed the sensory garden, meant specifically to give the blind a full botanical experience. However, there was still plenty to see, touch and smell. I made my way up to the overlook, where I got a nice panoramic view of San Antonio, and wandered through the rose garden, which had plenty of beautiful colors and scents.
[ABOVE]: Having captured the alien pod during our trip to Biloxi in July 2004, [BELOW]: Jennifer finds another otherworldly flora in San Antonio in October 2007.
Eventually, we found a nice place called the “Iron Cactus.” They had a splendid Mesoamerican décor, a sedate atmosphere and a friendly hostess. We paid attention to none of those features. What we noted was that they could seat us outside and they could do it right now. Good enough for us! The details of the meal are relatively unimportant, save that we split a huge sampler platter of various Mexican dishes, and I generously doused it all with the hottest hot sauce they would give me. A thrill-seeker I am not, and a roller-coaster wimp I am. But among our family and friends, my taste for spice is rivaled by few. The facility served us up a couple of Mexican beers, which I used to wash down my food and the little bits of my tongue flaking away because of the hot sauce. It wuh wurt it!
