This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to National Geographic Digital Nomad Andrew Evans’ presentation as a closing event of the Geological Society’s Geofest here in Philly. The ticket wasn’t cheap, and I am younger than the Geological Society’s member’s average age by about 60 years, but I love Andrew’s writing and really couldn’t resist the possibility of a nice evening out.
Boarded, buckled in, ready to fly. Excited to be heading off on another grand adventure—excited to have all of you sharing it w/ me! #travel
I’m a huge fan of Andrew’s because of the way he writes. On Twitter, he’s downright poetic. In a presentation he gave earlier this year at the Philadelphia Travel Show, he emphasized how important it is to be present in the moment, to create a scene. Now, I’m aware that Andrew writes for National Geographic, which for travel writers and photographers is the equivalent of maybe winning an Academy Award but like winning it constantly, every single working day. As you probably can tell from how much I (don’t) update my blog, it can sometimes take me months to process an experience. I went to Mexico City in July. It was probably life-changing, but I’m still working out my feelings.
Which is why I find myself drawn to Andrew’s work. He is someone who (yes, professionally) processes through his travels as we read about them. But here’s the thing; he’s also refreshingly human. He took a few minutes before his presentation to sit at my table and chat for a bit (I had let him know beforehand that I’d be there.) And, I am happy to report: he was in fact tired! Having just returned home from a three-week RTW followed by a conference in London, I recognized that look in his eyes – that look when you just want to go to bed and screw all this.
But the presentation! Pure bliss, to listen to those travel stories. For those who don’t know, Andrew Evans traveled from Washington DC to Antarctica – his dream destination, you know we all have one of those – by taking public buses. His story is rather famous, and you can read about it here. But I had never heard or read it, and I found myself listening, jaw-dropped.
It’s not true that the whole world has already been explored, Andrew says. Travel feeds you, but you can never get enough, Andrew says. Go without plans, Andrew says.
I was on a mission. A jeans mission. You see, every two years or so I do need to buy a new pair of jeans. This has less to do with my waistline fluctuating (it hasn’t, mercifully and frustratingly, since high school) and more to do with chub rub. Living in the city and walking so much, they just wear thin. Like down to the threads.
This past month, the threads were inconveniently timed. I can really only afford to indulge in one non-food, non-utilities, non-rent “THING” per paycheck. My list of needs are piling up really annoyingly. I need to re-order contacts. I need a haircut. I need to buy my cat’s anti-flea medication. I need to refurbish my laptop’s battery. I need X-rays taken at the dentist. I actually need to get my wisdom teeth out but at this point that seems like a joke.
So, I was standing in this Old Navy, looking down at this pair of $29 jeans and I was thinking. Thinking hard. Could I put this off one more pay-check? This was risky business. Wait too long and I could be caught flashing my tightey whiteys to the world and probably at the worst time, like the one time I go out dancing, or worse, when I would be picking up take-out. $29 would buy me another two years of jeans security. And yet, why, why was I standing in that store questioning myself?
Because I’ve conditioned myself never to shop. In my sidebar bio on this very blog, I tell you that one of my goals is to save $20,000. In the past two years I’ve saved $100. I sit in my cubicle and read blog after blog about people who have quit their jobs to travel the world. I’m caught between this feeling of knowing I do not have the disposable income to do what they did and wondering if I’m not trying hard enough.
Because, as my mother pointed out when I was telling her my Old Navy sob story, I do travel. Short little trips here and there. Whenever I can. Whenever I must. “But don’t you think it’s a little pathetic that I have to think not twice, but like five times about whether I can afford to buy a pair of $29 jeans?” I lament to her. “Most people in your position buy the jeans and skip the trip to Mexico you took in July,” she retorted.
Close friends and family will hear me complain almost constantly that I’m poor. Really I’m not. I have an apartment and a Netflix account. I may bottom out every paycheck, but I’m surviving. It’s just frustrating is all. I am running myself into a wall trying to make my dreams come true on $34k a year. I’m not one of those travel blogs you can read for inspiration. At least not yet.
Here’s how I’m dealing with it, at least in the time being. In true Amanda Elsewhere fashion, I’m finding humor in it. So I’ve started this Tumblr. It is called Young & Wild & Broke. I hope you will join me there from time to time as we together we scratch, claw, and clamor our way to the American dream (even if that American dream leads us Elsewhere).
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.)
The prospects? A business trip in Southern California until Wednesday, followed by a wedding in Phoenix on Sunday. What to do? Fly all the way back home to Philadelphia on Wednesday night, spend a few nights in Philly and then spring for another plane ticket out to Arizona on Saturday? “That seems tiring,” I thought to myself. And then a little seedling of an idea planted itself in my mind. The American West. A few days to myself. A road trip.
As soon as I thought it, my heart started racing. I Google-Mapped the route from LAX to Phoenix and dropped the little Street-View man right in the middle. Nothing but straight road through desert. All of the romance of a solo trip slammed down on me at once. I envisioned myself in a car. Blasting tunes. Stopping at diners. Meeting fellow roadies. Staring into the wide open nothing of the Grand Canyon before cruising on up to my friend’s wedding, trailing dust. I would emerge on the other side of this great adventure knowing the secret to the meaning to all of life. Surely spending three days alone, just me and the West, would amplify my confidence in showing up to this wedding alone, at least.
I had dreamt up the perfect plan.
Until a few days later I started to panic. Three days alone? In the desert? My confidence shaky, I started to look for hotels. And my car rental. The costs started adding up and the burden of my loneliness felt like a lead jacket.
My problem is that I am my own worst enemy. Too much time alone, and I turn on myself. Question myself. Blame myself.
I leave on Sunday. I still don’t know where I’m going to go, or how I’m going to pass the time once my work obligations in Anaheim are over. I can only say that it will just be me and the road.
Standing in the middle of a bustling night market in downtown Qindao, a group of gaunt American college students with empty stomachs stumble against the push and pull of the immense Chinese crowd, feeling a bit discouraged. We had set out with a very clear mission: to find food of a different variation than Chinese. Five days spent bringing meat of every assortment – cow, chicken, pig, turtle, goat, cat, dog, duck – to our mouths via chopsticks had simply been one day too many. We wanted, nay we craved, American food, wonderful, glorious, scrumptious American food. And specifically, we wanted pizza. On a fork.
The beginning of the night ... so naive.
An hour before the five of us had been optimistic, beaming, bursting with the kind of energy that the truly naïve possess. We pulled out an English map of Qindao, scoured the longitudinal and latitudinal lines until we found the location in grid C3 of one “W-Mart,” and our hearts danced a merry jig for right next to the “W-Mart” we found the happy words “Pizza Hut.” Visions of pepperoni slices and ice cold colas danced in our heads. I found myself fantasizing about taking that perfect bite of a slice of gooey, cheesy pizza, pulling it away from my mouth in slow motion, a greasy string of hot melting cheese marking the trail to my lips. Perhaps a symphony would be playing in the background; I don’t know.
No symphony plays when our taxi dropped us off in the middle of a night market somewhere in downtown Qindao. Our driver points fervently at the crowds of people gathered around the stands. We only protest for half of a second, but he has no idea what we are saying to him, so we give up, pay him, and walk into the cool night, our heads bobbing in every direction looking for any sign of the English language.
Thwarted only for a couple of minutes by the prospects of cheap market shopping (which turns out to be tables full of hair brushes, nail clippers, and cheaply constructed Puma sneaker knock-offs), we all stand, huddled on the corner of one street and another, underneath a highway underpass, having no idea whatsoever what to do. We cross the road and enter a department store and travel up to the very top floor, the children’s toy section. It is nearing 10:00pm; the is store empty, except for a few employees looking bored at their registers. Unfortunately none of them speak English, so when we ask them if they know where the Pizza Hut is, they smile and shake their heads apologetically. It is during this surreal scene: at the top of the escalator on the top floor of a random department store in a random city in China that I feel the most dejected.
Hunger leaves us mesmerized by the rhythmic motion of the escalator’s steps, whooshing out and moving downward, when out of the white bleak nothing appears a man who asks us (in English!) if we need help. “Yes!” we scream at him, five voices strong.
“We need to find the Pizza Hut.”
“I am sorry,” he replies. “You need the pizza? P-I-Z-Z-A?”
“YES!” we exclaim at him once more, urgency and excitement building.
“You do not like the food in China?” he asks, eyeing our pale skin and correctly deducing from our features and our request that we are foreigners.
Our explanations, which sound more like excuses, seem weak when they come out of our mouths. “We’ve had Chinese food for the past 4 days straight – breakfast, lunch, and dinner!” “Our bodies need a break!” “I left my Pepto Bismol in my cabin!” “We need an English translator at the restaurant with us and we haven’t found any yet!” And finally: “I miss home.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” our new friend assures us. “I will take you to the best pizza restaurant in the entire city.”
20-something writer and cubicle dweller constantly on the lookout for the next adventure. Dumping whole paychecks into trips around the world instead of my retirement fund. Have a love/hate (but mostly hate) relationship with Philadelphia. New life challenges: Save 20k & take gap year. Learn Spanish.
One time I wrote a great post about Jurassic Park, you can search for it (or anything else) here:
