“Destination: Ninstints”
5/26/17, “One Last Summer of Travel”
John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York (JFK)
As my five-year mission enters the home stretch, I begin
my one last summer of travel. That is
not to say that I will not take future summer trips. Of course, I will. It just means that that these intense summers
of travel, of which this will be the fifth, are coming to an end. I reached a key milestone in December by
having visited the last of the Olympic Stadiums, and my past four Memorial Day
trips to Athens (1896 and 2004), Stockholm (1912) and Helsinki (1952), Tokyo (1964), and Mexico City (1968) have all been built around visiting Olympic
Stadiums. This trip will be
different. It is entirely designed around
visiting the World Heritage Site of SGang Gwaay, also known as Ninstints. This trip and my July trip to Newfoundland
and Labrador will represent the last of my Canada trips. I have had some epic summers of travel, and
this one is sure to measure up.
I have
trips, either big or small, that cover the next seven weekends. After that, “Game of Thrones” starts up
again, and, once it is over, I fly to Hawaii for my epic trip to complete the
mission. During July and August, I will
take care of some unfinished business with weekend road trips, but I will not
miss any episodes of “Game of Thrones.”
After this trip, I will drive or ride up to Boston next weekend,
followed by a nine-day trip to Iceland and Greenland, my annual Maine trip will
follow, then the four-day trip to Newfoundland and Labrador on July 4th
weekend, and then a weekend trip to the Bay Area. Once I get back from San Francisco, I will
not get on another airplane until I fly to Hawaii two months later, but the
road trips promise to fill the gaps, and I have some good ones planned.
On a personal note, pending the formalities,
which I will miss while I am away this weekend, I have graduated from Hunter
College with my Baccalaureate in Philosophy.
This means that the Travelling Philosopher can now truly claim the title
of Philosopher with a capital pee. It’s
been an arduous process, especially with all this travelling, but the travel
has provided the motivation for finishing, and now I have finished. The next phase of my life can begin.
My flight has been delayed slightly, and it
does not have much of a substantive effect on my trip, bar one. Due to the fact that I will now not be
landing at YVR until well after 2 AM local time and sleeping en route, when I
write from YVR, it will be Day 1, not Day 0.
If the flight was on time, I could have still considered the YVR from
the airport hotel tonight to be part of Day 0.
Instead, I will need to publish just this entry as Day 0. Actually, it seems I may have set a precedent
when I wrote from Waco as Day 0 even after sleeping after midnight en route
ATL-DFW. I might hold this entry to
publish in conjunction with the YVR hotel entry, which is more elegant than
starting Day 1 with an entry from before I sleep in the hotel room.
Okay, so, as is my tradition, I will start
with Night -1, which was as epic as epic gets.
I need only say one word.
Pirates. If I were to make a list
of the top must-see franchises to see opening night, “Pirates of the Caribbean”
would easily make the top five, maybe even top three among current franchises,
since I do not think “Fantastic Beasts” properly carries the torch of the
“Harry Potter” franchise, and the other YA franchises of late do not compete
with the ones from the past ten years.
Those franchises would be “Star Wars” first, of course, maybe Marvel
second, and probably “Pirates of the Caribbean” third. DC, “James Bond,” “Fantastic Beasts,” and
“Indiana Jones” would be among the next level.
Kourosh was out of town this
weekend, but I had arranged for a different group. My friend Kris had been tentative about this
for months, but Raymond and his girlfriend were confirmed for just as
long. The four of us could make an epic
group. Kris wanted to go to Benihana for
dinner, his favorite place, and I am always happy to go. The meal is reasonably enough priced for the
amount of food and the experience, and it’s become our tradition. I realized that I had never gone without him
during my adult life, but my finger still hurts whenever I think about the burn
I sustained by touching the grill as a child when we went there as a
family. Kris has heard that story more
than once. This is at least the fifth
time we have gone together, including another time last week. It’s always much the same thing, though I try
to get different combinations of proteins each time, and the experience is
always the same but different, experiencing the unfamiliar within the familiar,
indeed.
We were seated at 6:30 PM for
dinner, and the movie was at 9 PM. We
should have had plenty of time for dinner and to meet Raymond for a cigar
before the movie, right? Wrong. The way Benihana works is you have a waiter
who takes care of the drinks, takes your order, and brings your soup and
salad. Then, the chef comes and cooks
and plates the hot food in front of you with their signature flair. It is a slow process, since they keep giving
you little bits of food at a time, so appetite management always poses a
challenge. You have to be hungry enough
to make it through the meal, but not too hungry that you’re starving before the
food is served.
Okay, I mentioned the
waiter was incompetent. First he took
our drink orders, and we had planned to drink later, so we just got soft drinks, club
soda for me and Coke for Kris, simple enough.
After he took our drink orders, he later came back with water and to
take the food orders. Kris and I looked
at each other. In all of our times here,
not once had we ever been given water without asking. We had each ordered a carbonated soft
drink. We didn’t need or want
water. We wanted our carbonated
drinks. The waiter handed me a straw,
which I handed back to me, only for him to give me a different straw. I reminded him that I had ordered club soda,
which he said was coming, and I told him I didn’t want the water.
Reader, we would be served the (very salty)
soup and salad before our drinks came.
This is the very definition of gross incompetence. Also, they have two types of beers, a
16-ounce draft and a 20.5-ounce bottle.
It is the same beer, just different sizes. Anyone who asked for the 16-ounce draft, he
tried to upsell the 20.5-ounce bottle, saying it was cheaper to get it that
way. That was a blatant lie. On a dollar per ounce basis, the 16-ounce
draft was actually cheaper. This got me
furious that he would misrepresent the basic math of it like that. Between that and the drinks taking forever,
and my plate being dirty (forgot to mention that), Kris and I both agreed that
he didn’t deserve a tip. We conferred,
but we wondered if the chef didn’t get half of the tip, and we didn’t want to
stiff the chef. We decided we would give
a cash tip to the chef and then tip a nominal amount (5%) on the check for the
waiter.
We were relieved once the chef
took over, and all the waiter had to do was refill our drinks, which he
actually managed to do in a timely manner.
The chef prepared our meal with plenty of pomp and circumstance, but I
just wanted to eat. The fried rice is
the best part, and it serves as a nice snack for while they are cooking the
proteins. There was just one
hiccup. One guy at our table had a
shellfish allergy, and shrimp is a big part of the dish. Also, my meal was steak and scallops. He could not cook the shellfish until after
he had cooked the meat for the guy with the allergies. I did not want to eat my steak and scallops
separately.
It didn’t take too long, but
I was starving, and it was torture. Once
I had all my food, I scarfed it down, and enjoyed it as much as always. We got our sherbet for dessert and then
figured out what to do about the tip.
After dinner, we decided we would walk to the theatre, and I lit up an
LFD Andalusian Bull, the #1-rated cigar of 2016. I had ordered a box in December, but it
didn’t come until this week. There was a
light mist, which made the walk annoying.
I had to deal with my laundry, so I told Kris I would meet him at the
theatre and also pick up a bottle of rum from my apartment.
The movie was at 9 PM, and we left the restaurant
at 8 PM. Without detailing all the
drama, as my account of dinner was far longer than I anticipated, my suit was
still not ready, and they were supposed to have mended it a week ago. I also had forgotten my homecoming shirt, so
I knew that I would have to drop off another load before the movie after
picking up the just-washed load. I met
Kris at the theatre at exactly 9 PM, and he was worried he would not make his
midnight bus. I reminded him that he
always has an open invitation to crash at my place, which he has done before
when he has a late night in the city and an early autographing opportunity the
next morning.
We went to the theatre,
and I got my soda and a popcorn for us to share, along with the new caramel
M&Ms. I asked him to butter the
popcorn while I went to the restroom, and he asked how much butter I wanted on
it. Sharing a smirk, I said, “Soak
it.” We met Raymond and his girlfriend
inside the auditorium, and we had plenty of snacks to go around. In addition to the rum, popcorn, and M&Ms
I had brought, they had more sweets. It
was going to be epic. There is nothing
quite like watching Pirates with a bottle of rum, with one exception: watching
“Lord of the Rings” and smoking a pipe.
We passed around the bottle of rum.
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum. A
pirate’s life for me.
The movie was
great, despite the lackluster reviews.
Most of the reviews were from people who had tired of the
franchise. For anyone who is still a fan
of the franchise after 16 years, it is must-see. As soon as the movie ended, we both looked at
each other and, just as we did a year-and-a-half ago after we saw “The Force
Awakens” together, instantly agreed that it the best since the original, the
second best in the franchise. Raymond
and Elaine were quite pleased, too. The
rain was pretty bad, and Kris didn’t want to trek back to the Port
Authority. We all walked back to Park,
and we said our goodbyes. Raymond and
Elaine took the subway, and Kris and I went to my place. We chatted about the movie and where Lucas
went wrong in the “Star Wars” prequels, along with brainstorming various ideas
that could have worked. Meanwhile, I
worked on freeing up some space on my phone and backing up my files.
Around 2 AM, we went to sleep, and I wanted
to be in the office by 7:30 AM. I also
wanted to pick up a bagel with lox first.
Without being explicit, let’s just say that the rum woke me up at 6:30
AM. It was three full REM cycles, so
headed out, walking up Park together until we had to part ways. I got my bagel with lox, which I ate at my
desk. That was when everything went to
hell. I couldn’t breathe. I had trouble staying awake throughout the
course of the day. At first I thought it
was allergies, so I got some loratadine, but that didn’t help, nor did
caffeine.
Something was off. I have had plenty of nights with four-and-half
hours of sleep or less, but this doesn’t happen. Could it have been an allergic reaction to
something I ate? I didn’t think it was
the lox, nor anything I had at Benihana.
Could it have been some type of mite in my apartment, such as a dust
mite? Why then did it only happen today
and last Friday? I tried to find the
similarity. The only similarity I could
find was both nights I had drank a fair amount (half a bottle of wine last
Thursday and a decent amount of rum last night), which perhaps combined with
the short sleep in this fashion. It
didn’t seem likely to explain the shortness of breath. What seemed more likely was that it was some
type of anxiety attack, having to do with some aspect of the trip not planned
perfectly, but that didn’t fit either, nor did it explain the sudden
tiredness. I am fine now, but it was
very scary.
I got done everything I
needed to do at work, and went to the street fair for lunch, instead of my
usual pre-departure meal at Hop Won.
Once I was done for the day, I headed home and collapsed. My flight was delayed, so I had time to nap
for an hour or so. I didn’t quite catch
a full REM cycle, since I woke up every half hour.
I then picked up a slice of pizza for dinner
and went to pick my laundry. My suit was
not ready, so I had to wear an old suit.
I packed and took a taxi to the airport, getting there around 8 PM, even
though my flight had been pushed back until 11:55 PM. There was a long line at security, but I had
plenty of time. Once I got to my gate, I
sat down and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I
can get a snack before we board.
Vancouver International Airport (YVR), British Columbia
It seems as if our long national nightmare is over. Whatever black mark I had on my record was
not carried over when Canada switched over to automated kiosks. The border control process at Canada is now
as quick as easy as using Global Entry coming back home. This is the second time I have flown into
Canada since they started using the kiosks, and both times it has been a
five-minute process. I will be able to
catch three or four full REM cycles at the hotel tonight, which, when added to
the two or three I caught on the plane, will constitute a full-night’s
sleep. Then, I can sleep in as late as I
want Sunday, since that day is unplanned.
That said, I am very tired, and, while I do not have much to record
since I closed, my initial entry was quite long and will take some time to
publish.
After I closed, I got some
chocolate and headed back to my gate. I
think I fell asleep while we were waiting to board. That’s when I learned the reason for the
delay. These planes usually fly JFK-YVR-HKG-YVR-JFK
and repeat the cycle. The plane that
flew YVR-JFK had to undergo some maintenance, so they swapped in a plane that
was coming direct from HKG. That plane
would not land until 10 PM, and it would not be available for our boarding
until 11:30 PM. I didn’t really
care. We soon boarded, and I fell asleep
as soon as we took off.
I woke up in
time for dinner, which was a failed attempt at an American beef stew. They should have just served us Cantonese food.
I fell back asleep immediately after
dinner and woke up as we were making our descent. From there, it was a short walk to the
Customs Hall, an easy process to the kiosk, and another short walk to the hotel
inside the terminal, a Fairmont, which made me very happy.
I didn’t even have to go outside. Everything was right there. They upgraded me to a suite, which was more
like a small palace, far more than I needed to crash just for the night, but it
sure was nice. After meticulously
turning off every light in the room so that I could get a proper establishing
shot, I sat down by the window, where I proceeded to write this entry, which I
will now close so that I can publish and get some sleep before my flight
tomorrow.
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