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Happy New Year, I Wrote This From a Plane

Posted in America, tagged , on January 12, 2013 | 2 Comments »

It’s funny; for as much traveling as I do, I haven’t really gotten used to the idea of air travel. I mean, I’ve gotten used to the process of it, so much so that I really have to try to remember that all those fumbling in the TSA security line to fit their liquids into baggies are maybe doing all of this for the first time. Last year, I flew from Philadelphia to Portland (OR), Las Vegas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Mexico City, and Fort Lauderdale. And that was a light year.

You’d think that an airport would be the place where someone like me would feel the most at home. But, a lot of the times I’m in airports, or in airplanes for that matter, my stomach is reeling from the greasy food I’ve just consumed, my eyes are bleary and tired, my butt hurts from too much sitting, and I’m cursing bathroom architects. (Why, oh why, do airport bathroom stall doors push IN? Trying to stuff my body and all my bags into one of those without touching the toilet and then closing the door behind me is no small feat.) Airport time is suspended time.

As I’m writing this, I’m flying to Maui. I’ve been to Hawaii before, and I got there the way I associate travel: slowly, on a ship. Back in 2007, it took one week for us to sail to Honolulu from Kobe, Japan, and it took another week for us to reach San Diego from Honolulu. My flight today from Phoenix to Maui is six hours. Six hours in the sky is just enough time to feel completely bored and also completely awed. I’ve hurled my body across the world today, and it just doesn’t feel like traveling. It feels like cheating.

Perhaps I feel this way because I haven’t been quite so far away in while. Or maybe I feel this way because for the first time, my family and friends and coworkers are a lot more expressive over my choice of destination. Here’s how it usually goes: “Hey guys, I’m going to Mexico City!” Them: “Oh. Don’t die.” Here’s how it went this time: “Hey guys, I’m going to visit Kelly in Hawaii!” Them: “OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO LUCKY! HAVE SOOOOOOO MUCH FUN.” Okay then.

Or maybe I feel this way because I know slow travel, the kind of slow travel I had hoped to be doing by this point in my life, won’t be possible for me for at least another year. Late last year, I accepted a promotion at my job. In doing so, I promised to stay on for a year (partially as part of an incredulous response to my interviewer when she said “I don’t want to hire you because I’m afraid you will quit to travel.”) I haven’t signed any contracts, but the truth is, I am no closer to saving the kind of money I need to take a long-term trip as I was at this point last year. So, now, for the first time in my post-graduate life, I am feeling what it is like to have both feet on the ground in my real life in Philadelphia, instead of one-foot out the door in my mind. And it scares the shit out of me. Which is why two days after being promoted, I booked this impromptu trip to Maui. Which is why I’m currently on an airplane. Which is why I don’t have any money. But, hey, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.* (*Full disclosure, I haven’t been able to stop eating cake since I started Dry January aka Drynuary, but that’s a story for another day. Literally I ran out of cake last night, the night before my flight to Hawaii so I don’t know what that says about my life).

Happy New Year, friends and random people who clicked this post off Twitter. My hope for all of us is that we can earnestly try to better ourselves in 2013. The weird thing is, I’m optimistic about all of this.

plane

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Why You Should Never (Like Ever) Fly Spirit Airlines

Posted in The Business of Traveling, tagged , , on September 3, 2012 | 4 Comments »

You may find yourself, one day, staring at a fare that you can’t possibly believe exists. It’s so cheap, so tempting. But, you’ve heard the horror stories. Carry-on baggage fees. Cancelled flights. Airplanes held together with duct tape. So you Google “Should I fly on Spirit Air?” And maybe that’s how you found me, and my sad tale of woe. I’m here to save you all the trouble I experienced this summer. Carry-on baggage fees. Cancelled flights. Okay, maybe my plane wasn’t held together with duct tape, but some child definitely scribbled ALL over it with a ballpoint pen. Really. I wish I had a picture.

But you know what? Shit happens. Especially when you travel frequently. Flights get cancelled. As far as the fees? Unfortunately, random fees are becoming the norm. So while Spirit’s carry-on baggage fee is annoying, it wasn’t a deal-breaker when I booked a flight from Myrtle Beach to Toluca, Mexico via Dallas earlier this summer. The total cost of the ticket, including baggage fees, still made the ticket worth buying. But, as you will see, Spirit Air has absolutely NO crisis-managing skills. Which is a shame, because flying on Spirit is like a nonstop crisis.

A ditty: Sometime around midnight and 1:00am one early Tuesday morning in Toluca, my friend and I were informed by the ticket agent that our plane (scheduled to leave at 3:30am) was experiencing mechanical problems (hmmm… anyone have a fresh roll of duct tape?) and that we would miss our 7:30am connection in Dallas to get back to Myrtle Beach. The agent told us to wait out of line while they figured out what to do with us.

Around 3:30am, when our flight was supposed to leave, another agent approached us – or should I say woke us up from our glamourous airport-chair slumber – and told us that our new scheduled departure time was 5:00am and that we would need to rebook for Thursday or take a refund of $60 and rebook on another airline out of Mexico City. Wait two days, or take the $60 – which would barely cover the cost of a taxi from Toluca to Mexico City let alone buy us a new flight?

After much consideration, we decided to take the delayed flight back to Dallas, despite being warned that we would miss our connection. We figured things would be easier to sort out in the States, without the burden of translating Spanish to English in the middle of the night. Plus, I was so groggy that every time the thickly-accented agent said “Myrtle Beach” I heard her say “Myrtle Bitch” which almost led to a diplomatic breakdown of nations. “I’m sorry, who are you calling a bitch?”

A lot of frustration and many silent prayers later, we landed in Dallas and, with an original layover window of two hours, missed our connection by thirty minutes. It was 8:00am. We had been up all night, we had ran through customs (me, breathless and sweating telling Homeland Security that NO I didn’t buy anything in Mexico now can you please stamp my goddamn passport so I can get going?), and then endured the indignity of having to go through a TSA-monitored security line moving at the speed of snail, and then caught a tram to take us from Gate C where we landed to Gate E to where our plane, if by some miracle might still be (thinking maybe, just maybe, our connecting flight would be delayed too – and then we would make it!) Alas, no. At 8:00am, a half-hour after our connection left from Dallas to Myrtle Beach on time, we stood, utterly spent, in front of a Spirit Air agent and a view out the window of a jetway leading to nothing.

And this leads me to my favorite part of the whole expedition. Again, the agent in Dallas told me that I’d either need to take a refund (this time, $30) or wait two days until the next flight to Myrtle Beach. At this point, fatigued, devastated as I was beginning to realize I might have to live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport for two days when I could have had two extra days in aguacate paradise, I asked her “Do you have any advice? I mean, I just don’t even know what to do right now.” This was her reply, as she continued to avoid eye-contact with me, as she continued to type on her computer:

“Honestly, I’m a crybaby. If I were in your position right now, I’d cry.”

Here is the real problem with Spirit Air. Their limited schedule, which keeps the prices of their flights low, means that if you miss a connection by thirty minutes, by a mere one-thousand eight hundred seconds, you’re screwed until the next flight. If they only operate that leg twice a week, that means you’d have to wait multiple days until you could get home – and that’s if there’s room on that next flight to re-book you.

In the end, my friend and I took our $30 refunds and bought $200 one-way flights on US Airways to Charleston. We then had a lot of help from friends and family to get back to Myrtle Beach. After my experience with Spirit, stepping onto a US Air operated flight felt like stepping into a palace that flew. That $200 get-me-the-hell-home ticket I hastily purchased on my smart-phone in front of the US Airways ticket counter (adding another layer of absurdity to the day: booking an airline ticket online using my smart-phone was about $100 cheaper than walking up to the counter and buying it from an actual person) thus erased any small victory I had initially felt when booking my OMG SUPER CHEAP TRIP to Mexico, and since I’m a budget traveler, negatively impacted the rest of my summer.

So if you’ve got a Spirit Air booking page open in another window, and you’re trying to make your decision, I’d advise that you check the schedules that Spirit operates that route. Make sure that they don’t only fly that leg only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays and Wednesdays, or Sundays only, or something else crazy, which, if they run out of duct tape, could potentially leave you with no other option than to cry and then swear to never, like ever, fly Spirit Air again. (Because, girlfriend, no airline deserves your tears.)

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Travel Confession: Orlando Edition

Posted in America, Business Travel, tagged , , , , on October 20, 2011 | 7 Comments »

Forgive me Readers, for I feel chagrined.

It has been, well, about 21 years that I’ve needed to confess: I secretly but not so secretly want to go to Disney World.

Before I write any further, I must tell you that the pitter-patter of my once-tiny feet did grace the magical ground of fantasy and wonder. The year was 1990. Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years, East and West Germany ended their political separation, Ice Ice Baby dominated the radio airwaves, and I had dinner with Mickey Mouse. It was, in a word, forgettable. That’s right, forgettable. I was four-years-old! My memories from that family vacation – the only one we ever took outside of our annual trips to the beach – are kind of blurry. I remember waiting in a really long line. I remember pushing a button that made Dumbo fly. I remember a parking lot full of white rental vehicles. And that’s about it.

Today I write to you as a 25-year-old woman who has stood on the equator, the Great Wall of China, and in the ocean. So why do I feel like I missed out?

Last week I was sent on a work assignment to Orlando, Florida. I wish this blog entry were about how I finally got back to Disney World, and found it to be (everything I thought it would be/extremely as overrated as I know it is), but I didn’t. I spent nearly all of my time on a golf resort (oh haaaaay Rosen Shingle Creek Resort) contemplating the complete construct that is Orlando, Florida.

Here’s the part where I get all world-travelly (read: judgemental, critical, acting like I’m better than you, you Disney Freak. Proceed only if Mickey Mouse wasn’t the officiant at your wedding.) Okay, ten times out of ten, nay, one hundred times out of on hundred, I will choose to strap on my trusty been-everywhere hiking boots and swing on my backpack and point my feet in the direction of oh, I don’t know, South America, Antarctica, Africa, Europe, Asia, Montana – rather than vacation at Disney. While waiting around in airports, I will continue to be frightened of all planes arriving to gates in my near proximity FROM Orlando (Oh God, take OFF the Mickey ears! And stop screaming, for the love of Jack Sparrow) and be just a tad bit creeped that a place like the town of Celebration, FL actually exists. I admit I will scoff the childless (okay, even parents with children) who make Disney World an annual vacation. Because really what it is, what Disney World actually is – is an elaborate marketing ploy, a gigantic cash machine that manufactures an imaginary fairyland and builds it and charges you $80 or some shit like that to get in. And if you do get a chance to chat up the locals – THEY’RE CARTOON CHARACTERS! And that’s what my head tells me.

When my plane landed in Orlando last week, I hired a shuttle. While waiting for the shuttle to pick me up and deliver me to a week of working at an aerosol research conference, I watched countless other people load into the (I shit you not) Magical Express to Disney. And I’ll be goddamned if I told you that I didn’t want to follow them.

So, here’s the conclusion that I reached after a week in my resort-prison: Disney World is kind of a threat to me, and the kind of life I think I want. My whole life I’ve known that I wanted more than the traditional job-house-family (ironic, right? I did spend my entire childhood watching – wait for it – Disney movies). In the words of one of the great Disney heroines, Belle: “I want much more than this provincial life! I want adventure in the great wide somewhere! I want it more than I can tell!” (Nevermind that her adventure consisted of…you guessed it, marrying the Beast turned [what someone in the animation department thought was a] hottie and living in domestic bliss the rest of her life.) I know, I mean, I’m nearly certain, that to be a full-time traveler would be the absolute best life I could ever dream to have. But what if that life comes at the cost of … well, Disney World, and everything Disney World stands for?

I'm so Belle. Before the Beast.

What traveler, when puking all night in a cold South American $5/night hostel, HASN’T thought that a vacation where you push a button that makes Dumbo fly would just be easier? (Anybody?) To allow yourself to just – let go. To willingly buy the fantasy. To forget for a moment that you’re supposed to have serious aspirations – like to climb Machu Picchu, or to camp at the real Oktoberfest, or to afford a cruise around the Galapagos.

All I know is that I just wanted to be scooped up by a family getting on the Magical Express for a week of guilt-free fun, not a responsible adult in town for business, even though I know everything about Disney World is the worst (crowds, children, fanny packs, expenses, the blatant fakeness of it all). Does the Disney Monster really have that strong of a grip on my psyche that I still feel the pull to go? Or is it something much deeper? I know I’m terrified of the day when I look at all those families and wish that I had one of my own. But, I keep asking myself whether the self-professed Traveler is really just running away from the possibility that he or she could find happiness with the kind of stability that drives people (and their families) to vacation in Orlando. Could a girl who wants to go around the world again and again ever be satisfied with … Epcot?

What about you, fellow world-travelers: What are your thoughts on a Disney World vacation? Completely abhorrent, or harmless fun?

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A Few Thoughts on Reverse Culture Shock

Posted in America, tagged , , , on August 6, 2011 | 3 Comments »

I’d just like you to know that I’m not an idiot.

I just never (never ever ever except this one time) check a bag. So, at 5:00pm, when faced with a line of kiosks beckoning my friend and me to check into our American Airlines flight from MIA to PHL which would conclude our impossibly long travel day (which began at 3:30am in a hostel in Quito), I think to myself “This computer can’t weigh my bag!”

Apparently lingering too long at the kiosks arouses the suspicions of the an employee whose job it is to monitor them. “What are you doing?” Kiosk Lady asked. “Just trying to check into our flight a bit early – we were hoping to maybe get on standb–” my friend starts to explain. Kiosk Lady interrupts: “Just get in line.”

Permission granted, we shift our weary bodies to the line which would lead us to, you know, an actual person. Only there is yet another employee there to guard the line! “Why aren’t you using the kiosk?” Line Lady asks. “We were told to get in line…?” we reply, almost defensively. “Okay, go,” she says. (Insert “How many airline employees does it take to prevent you from talking to another airline employee” joke.)

Finally we reach the heavily barricaded Check-In Lady who issues this statement without ever making eye contact with us: “There is no standby. There is only one flight from Miami to Philadelphia and you are on it.” Okay, good to know. Then this: “See that sign over there marked E3?” She points across the terminal. “You gotta bring your bags to the guys over there.”

No “Buenos tardes.” No “Gracias.” No smiles. Just a $25 bag fee to carry and load our own bags onto the plane? Roughly translated: “Welcome to America. Fuck you.”

Reverse culture shock strikes me differently every time. Four years ago, when I had arrived home to suburban Pennsylvania from Southeast Asia, where I witnessed people labor in the most insufferable heat imaginable, the sight of SUVs driving around in the summer with their windows up (presumably with the A/C blasting) caused me to experience a very profound rage. To this day, I don’t feel comfortable turning on the air conditioner unless The News tells me that it’s so hot outside all old people, babies, and defenseless animals seeking refuge in my apartment will die.

This week, coming from Ecuador, home to some of the nicest people I’ve ever encountered in all my years of travel (seriously – we met a bilingual man who spent his entire Sunday showing us Quito and answering our endless questions about Ecuadorian life – from politics to marriage, who THEN took us grocery shopping, who THEN bagged our groceries) made the aggression and hostility of American culture seem especially trying. In the beginning of our trip I felt so uncomfortable with all the “niceness” around me (the greetings! the smiles! the attempts to speak English! the “let me show you all the pictures of my family members!” the flowers given to us by the children in the villages! the invitations to graduation parties -ok that one might have been a joke) that I actually remarked out loud “The people here are so nice it almost makes me sad,” meaning I felt that by accepting so much kindness I was somehow taking advantage of their culture. Toward the end I was lapping up every “Buenas Dias” like a big dog to an ice cream cone.

I’ve obviously been an American my whole life, and have spent many more days upon my own shores than those of foreign lands. So, why, then, is it so (for lack of a better word) shocking to come home to what I’ve always known?

The only explanation I can offer is this: When traveling, it is as easy to accept the goodness in another culture as easily as it is to forget the badness in your own. You remember the big stuff, sure. Three days of traipsing in Amazon Rainforest and I’m like “The United States has Starbucks, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but shucks it sure is wonderful to be greeted with a cheerful ‘Buenas Dias’ every morning here in Ecuador.”

At the same time, you will invariably start to see yourself through the eyes of the people whose country you’re visiting, and if you happen to be traveling through a developing nation the exchange goes something like this: “As an American you must have money, and I see that you are traveling, therefore your life must be full of rainbows.” You become affirmed this over and over again, implicitly and explicitly. This isn’t a comfortable feeling, in fact, it’s terrible, but it does mess with your psyche.

Then you come home and after standing behind a woman who insists on finishing her cell phone conversation in line at the airport Food Court instead of paying attention to actually paying for her heavily-processed to-go meal, while listening to the ubiquitous talking heads on CNN blabbering on about the debt crisis and how it’s bound to bring another recession, then realizing that you have to go to work (gasp!) this week and it actually doesn’t pay a million dollar salary, and no, you don’t live in huge NYC apartment with all your friends like in Friends, you begin to realize it kind of sucks here, for everyone really except Kim Kardashian and her recession-proof ass. By the time you board that one last plane and the ticket-taker wishes you a happy flight you’re already mumbling a sarcastic “yeah right” under your breath.

How quickly we get sucked back in!

How To Survive Reverse Culture Shock (America Edition)

1. I have no fucking clue.
2. Usually I cry for a few days.
3. I look at my pictures a lot.
4. The period of acceptance will come.
5. In the meantime, you have Starbucks.
6. You could start planning a new trip.
7. Also – in all seriousness – you could reflect on the parts of yourself that have changed as a result of the trip you’ve just taken. I, for one, vow that I will finally learn Spanish. Thank you, Ecuador, for finally instilling in me that desire to truly become fluent in another language. Gracias. Gracias, gracias, gracias.

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