“Remember
the Alamo”
10/7/16,
“Moving Goalposts”
LaGuardia
Airport, New York (LGA)
“You know
they just added the San Antonio Missions [to the UNESCO World Heritage Site
list], right?” That brief sentence was
the impetus for this trip, uttered oh so casually by a Park Ranger at a
Visitors Center in Glacier National Park during our Last Great Summer Road Trip
Adventure. It was the moving of the
goalposts. There was no way that we
would not be making this trip. Earlier
that day, unaware of this new inscription, I had erroneously announced,
“Mainland US Complete,” thinking that I had now visited every World Heritage
Site in the Mainland United States, along with all 48 States. The goalposts had moved. We instantly began talking about this
trip. It was a while before we properly
planned it, but we knew we had have to take it, and, from the beginning, this
was the weekend we considered for it.
Three years ago today I was flying back from Dallas early due to the
government shutdown, having to mostly cancel a trip that would have allowed me
to say “Southwest Complete”. That, too,
contains moving goalposts, with new National Park Sites in the Southwest being
added almost every year. I have made
numerous trips to the Southwest to slowly work towards that goal, but all of
those trips cannot add up to the magic of what that 10-day trip would have
entailed. I am still sore about that,
and it is the reason I will never forgive Ted Cruz, nor will I vote for him in
four years, no matter what.
The
goalposts are moving in other ways, too.
I keep adding new things to my travel list, setting supplemental goals
beyond my 17 Goals, which, themselves, represented moving goalposts from my
original 4. We will soon be boarding, so
I will need to wrap up and treat Day 0 en route. Another thing I’m trying to do is visit the
“most iconic restaurant” in each state.
I will not necessarily be revisiting states that I visited before I
moved those goalposts, but we will be dining at Texas’s most iconic restaurant
this trip, a BBQ pit, of course.
When I
go to Oklahoma next year, I will be able to turn it into “Texas Complete”, and
that is a feat towards which I have been diligently working, likewise for
“California Complete” when I visit San Francisco. Those are both moving goalposts, but I have
been able to figure out how to incorporate those goals into trips I needed to
take anyway to satisfy the 17 Goals.
These moving goalposts, they are what make travel fun and what allows me
to revisit places with a new interest.
On the other hand, sometimes, I delay a trip, and a new site gets
inscribed before I make the trip, and I am able to thereby incorporate it into
the trip, but many trips have been solely designed around moving
goalposts. This trip is one such trip,
as was the trip I took to Louisiana last year and will be the trip I take to
Jamaica later this year. My trip to
Greenland will be modified in anticipation of a moving goalpost, and my trip to
Mexico last month included a similar stop.
These are what moving goalposts represent.
I actually think I have time to treat Day 0
now. I slept in a bit and got ready,
having packed last night. As I was about
to leave, I realized that I had forgotten to pack my World Heritage Site
folder. That would have been a disaster
level event if I forgot it. I would be
leaving for class at noon and not coming back to the office afterwards. I was able to get everything I needed to do
before I left, and I wound up walking out with the owner. We mutually decided to try a Mediterranean
place called Roti. I got a wrap, which
was actually pretty good, but the spices hit me hard and almost knocked me
out.
I lit up a Toscano and biked to
class. After class, I biked back to my
apartment to retrieve my suitcase. I
walked up to the cigar shop, stopping for donuts at a street fair on 40th
Street. At the cigar shop, I completed a
very familiar pre-departure ritual for the last time, now that the shop is
closing before my next trip. I smoked my
Cohiba, said my goodbyes, and hailed a taxi to LGA.
I had no issues with security other than my
usual “longbag” issue, and then I headed to the gate, thinking that this was
truly worse than a third world airport.
More than once, I said, out loud, that Zimbabwe has a better
airport. It’s true. I sat down by the gate at a sit down pizza
place. I ordered a pie with bacon,
mushrooms, and onions, along with a beer.
It was all very good.
My flight
to Houston would soon be boarding. They
announced that they would need volunteers.
To summarize, they made an offer I couldn’t refuse. I was the first one to volunteer. I would have to connect in Atlanta and arrive
in Houston a little over two hours later than scheduled. My compensation? An AMEX gift card for an amount that was
almost equal to a week of my net pay. In
the end, they only needed one volunteer.
Since I volunteered first, it was mine.
After they closed the flight, they set me up with my boarding passes,
and I walked literally just across the passageway to the Atlanta gate, where I
sat down and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close, as it is
almost my time to board.
Houston,
Texas
Now that’s a
new dateline. For all the times I have
connected at IAH on my way back from Central America (actually just twice), I
have never set foot in the city of Houston.
I will not so much as take a ceremonial picture here, though, until we
return on Tuesday, but this vista of the First Court of Appeals will serve as
my introduction to Houston. I suppose
that I could say almost the entirety of the past eight hours since I closed at
LGA was filled with aggravation, and the time that wasn’t was mostly spent
moving goalposts in the southeast and discovering that a goalpost in California
had been moved making my goal of “California Complete” pretty much impossible
under my current travel schedule. Since
“California Complete” is not one of my 17 Goals, it will not be happening under
this Travelogue unless I have reason to go to Vegas in the next 11 months.
My LGA-ATL flight was unadventurous, and I
spent the bulk of it messaging with my brother, which was the beginning of the
aggravation. I had my leftover pizza
along with a club soda, followed by a coffee and cinnamon cookies. I was under the impression that the LGA-ATL
flight would land in the same concourse as the ATL-IAH flight departed. When I landed, I learned that was not the
case. I landed in the Concourse E. I needed to get to Concourse A. I was not in danger of missing my connection,
but I wanted to have a cigar, ATL being one of the few remaining airports in
the country where you can smoke inside.
I asked where the smoking lounge was when I got off the plane, and this
led to more aggravation. She asked what
concourse I was flying out of, and I told her Concourse A. “There’s one in A, too.” “A2, okay.”
“No, I mean, there is one in Concourse A, as well. Do you know what your gate is?” “A2.”
She looked at me bewildered. I
took the tram to Concourse A and picked out the one cigar that I could spare
from my carefully selected stash.
I
stopped at an Atlanta Bread Company for a bagel with cream cheese, along with a
muffin top (or so they called it). After
more aggravation waiting and my pressure minutes I’d have for my cigar wasting
away, she finally asked me if I wanted the bagel sliced. Huh? I
asked her how she planned to put the cream cheese on it if it wasn’t
sliced. She explained that they give a
packet of cream cheese on the side.
Wonderful.
I headed towards my
gate, and the smoking lounge was actually a bar, which required a
purchase. It was now about 9:50 PM. The flight would depart at 10:40 PM, and
boarding would begin at 10:00 PM. I
would be lucky to have half an hour with the cigar. I sat in the bar, ordered an American
whiskey, which is horribly overpriced, and lit up my Aroma de Cuba. It smoked like shit. I couldn’t wait to be ditch it as early as
possible. I didn’t even want the full
half hour with it. I got into a
political debate with the guy sitting next to me, and, as soon as I finished my
whiskey, I ditched the cigar, said my goodbyes, and headed to the gate.
When I got to my seat, being in Group 1, the
plane was almost entirely empty, but my row, there was a guy sitting in the
middle seat (I had the window). I knew
that something was off, from the way he was sitting, from his glazed off
look. I got into my seat, and, as we
took off, my suspicions were confirmed.
Almost immediately, his leg next to me started shaking
uncontrollably. It only happened when
his eyes were closed. It was obviously
some type of medical condition, whether physical or neurological, so asking him
to stop was not an option. The only
thing I could do was use my leg as a shield and wait for his to hit mine, at
which point it would stop. It was as
annoying and distracting as hell. When
the beverage service came, I got another club soda and a coffee to pair with
the bagel and muffin top. Remembering the
Seinfeld episode, this was not a true muffin top. It was just a muffin made in shape that
resembled the top. It only works if they
make the whole muffin. They did
not.
I spent almost the whole flight
looking at trip routes in the southeast, wondering if moving the goalposts to
“Original 13 Colonies Complete” was a viable goal based on my current trips
planned with the addition of two weekends by car to Maryland and Virginia. It would all come down to North Carolina, but
it looked doable. I also discovered that
there was a newly designated (that’s the word I was looking for earlier)
National Monument in California that was not easily accessible from either of
my two current trips planned to California.
In fact, it was far closer to Vegas than any other site in
California. That, combined with the
difficulties I was facing in the Sierra Nevada region, made it seem like I
should abandon the “California Complete” quest.
We soon landed, and I headed to Hertz.
More aggravation. It was weird
leaving the airport at Houston, since I was familiar with the airport, but not
its exterior. I also recalled an
incident from when I landed in Chicago and someone woman said that she wished
that the rental car companies would share buses like they do in Houston. They shared them here. Actually, the whole setup reminded me of
DFW.
When I got to Hertz, there was even
more aggravation. Since I had booked the
car through Expedia, my gold membership did not carry over, and, since it was
so late, the gold counter was closed.
Summarizing here, but I walked up to the guy at the counter ten minutes
after he told me he could help me out in five minutes, and he finally pulled up
my reservation. There was a huge line
for this understaffed location, and it was late, so I wanted to avoid the line
if possible. When he saw my reservation,
he said that I wasn’t a gold member. I
said that I was but that it’s not my fault the reservation didn’t link. “Sure you are.” There it was.
He set me off. No one calls me a
liar. “Are you calling me a liar?” I
shot back sharply in a firm but measured voice.
Again, summarizing, he threatened to cancel my reservation, and I asked
for his name so that I could call customer service and have him fired. He told me that I needed to wait on the long
line, which my gold member status should have entitled me to skip, and he would
give me his name after I waited on line.
After about 15 minutes, I walked up to him, and he said, “Let’s start
over.” I realized that was as close to
an apology as he was capable of issuing.
Why he chose customer service and night shifts as a career is beyond
me. He even gave me a shiny new car with
less than 10,000 miles. In the end, I
didn’t ask again for his name. It would
be almost 30 minutes to the hotel, and it was well after midnight now.
It was after 1 AM when I got to the
hotel. I
checked in, got situated, and relaxed for a bit. I could see the First Court of Appeals from
the window, so I neutralized the smoke detector got set up there, where I sat
down, lit up my Ardor, and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now
close so that I can publish and get some sleep.
It is late, and I have a long day tomorrow. A very long day.
No comments:
Post a Comment