Travelin’ Thornberries Riverwalk to San Antonio

October 11 to October 14, 2007

Hello, My Darlings!

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.

Click for Part II