The meme takes it on the road

There's an interesting meme making the rounds just now.

It calls for a list of every city in which you've spent at least one night (other than home) during 2009. You're supposed to mark each one with an asterisk in which you spent more than one non-consecutive night.

Here's mine:

Vancouver, BC
Lawrence, Ks
Kansas City, Mo
Atlanta, GA
Columbus, OH
Portland, OR

Too many nights away from home, and I hardly ever travel.

How about you?

There and back again

Talk about your whirlwind tours.

My daughter's wedding was this past Saturday. You may recall that she lives in Ohio and so I had to take wing to get there. Oh, sure, I could have taken the bus or rented a car for a 5,000-mile round trip, but either would have meant days on the road and for financial reasons I couldn't leave until Thursday and had to be back Monday, so . . .

The wedding was lovely, my daughter gorgeous, I cried my eyes out during the ceremony and the reception party was a hoot. Daughter and new hubby are off on a cruise, somewhere in the sunny Caribbean, God bless them.

But that's not what this blog is about.

This is the second trip I have taken by airplane in eight weeks (the first was to Kansas in mid-July for Jim Gunn's Sf Writers Workshop) and both trips were a nightmare. It's been years since I've flown and I couldn't help but wonder where the friendly skies have gone.

I have mentioned here before that I am a woman of considerable size, both in height and weight. There is nothing average about me, so the fact that I am wedged into coach-class airline seats is a given. And I never expect decent food on a flight. Airplanes are not restaurants. Just as long as I can get a couple of glasses of Diet Coke, I am content.

But what happened to courtesy and polite service?

I flew to Kansas and returned via United and never got as much as a smile from a single airline employee. And the return flight was a horror. I arrived in Denver for a connecting flight to Seattle, only to discover that my connector had been canceled, as had the next and final flight for the day.

After standing in line for an hour at a service counter, I was told that they could book me on a late morning flight the next day. There was no explanation for why the flights were canceled (despite my questions) and no offer of compensation for meals or overnight accommodation. I did manage to get a refund on my ticket to pay for a flight aboard Alaska Air (the last of the day) and arrived home six hours late.

And so, I was hesitant about flying to Ohio for the wedding, but chose to travel via Delta, figuring United and Denver had been a bad turn of luck.

Oops.

My flight left Seattle fifteen minutes late, headed for Atlanta, where I had thirty-five minutes to catch the connector. We landed in Atlanta ten minutes late and then sat on the apron another ten minutes, waiting for traffic to clear, leaving me fifteen minutes to reach the connector gate -- in another terminal.

I arrived just as the agent was closing the bridge door and he refused to open it again, even though the plane sat at the gate for another ten minutes. I don't know. It was almost ten p.m. and he probably had had a long day. Maybe I scared him. I can loom when I am anxious and I was gasping my words, after my mad dash between gates.

At least Delta did pay for my hotel room in Atlanta Thursday night and I made it into Columbus by nine a.m. Friday morning.

Even so, I have had my fill of standing in lines, undressing for airport security, squeezing into tiny seats aboard noisy airplanes and having to deal with rude airline employees who don't seem to like their jobs. I don't travel very much, so I suppose my miniscule contribution to the airline economy won't be missed.

But the big silver birds have seen the last of me.

I swear we just got here

Today is the first anniversary of our arrival in Seattle. (We got here on a Saturday, but it's the date that's important. October 27).

It was a seat-of-the-pants, leap-of-faith move; we showed up with a few thousand dollars in our pockets, everything we owned in an eight-by-ten trailer hitched to the SUV, hardly any income flow and no place to live.

That wasn't how we planned it, of course. Rachael flew to Seattle, from Miami, twice last spring to test and interview for a job with the King County Correction Department. We thought it was a lock; she was a Florida-certified corrections officer with almost four years experience, she passed all their tests with room to spare and got good recommendations from the folks at Monroe County Detention Center.

But September rolled around and our lease was up the end of the month and we still hadn't got the yes from King County. So I said, "Let's drive to Ohio and visit my family for a week or two." And we did.

I'm not sorry we did that; my Dad is eighty-seven and every second that I got to spend with him was golden. But October twenty second came around and we were still in Ohio. We didn't want to hit snow in the mountains, so we decided to head west. We had an apartment set up, and we figured we would just wait it out.

"We can both get temporary jobs,if it comes to that," I said. "Just until the county calls."

We decided to leave Thursday morning, the twenty-fifth. And then the bubble burst. Two letters showed up in the mail Wednesday. One from the apartment complex and one from King County. The apartment had, by accident, been rented and they had nothing else available until December first; even worse, King County said they would not be tendering a job offer.

What could we do? We both had been dreaming about Seattle for months. Thursday morning, we said goodbye, climbed into the SUV and drove toward the sunset. And drove and drove and drove. We didn't want to spend money on motels, so we just pulled over when we were tired.

We drove down out of the Cascades sixty hours later. I cried when we saw Mount Rainier; it felt as if I had come home.

It's been a struggle, but God has blessed us. We found an apartment we both loved that Sunday and moved in on Tuesday. Rachael found work, at a Barnes & Noble, less than a mile from us. Somehow, the money stretched.

Now, Rachael is driving a Metro Transit bus, and loving it. We are in a larger apartment, in the same building we found that Sunday, with a spectacular view of Puget Sound and two restaurants we adore a short walk away. There is even money left over after the bills are paid, so that we can go out for a bit of fun, now and then.

And for me, my fiction is flowing, almost faster than I can write it down, and it is selling. Ten stories since the first of June, five of which have already been in print. I have edited my novel, Lifting Up Veronica, and sent it out to be considered for publication, and my son and I have written a screenplay, Black Rock, working via the internet.

Best of all, Rachael and I have each other; she swears we are halves of the same soul. I think she is right. Life in Seattle is good, it gets better day by day, and I swear we just got here.

On the road again

Moving to a new city, where a job and a place to live are waiting, is an adventure; that's how Rachael and I made it to the Florida Keys.

Moving 3500 miles cross-country on a leap of faith is something else, something that may not even have a name. But that's how we came to Seattle; in our SUV, towing a trailer that contained everything we owned, hoping there would be something for us when we arrived.

We were lucky, that first Sunday here; we found an apartment we both fell in love with the instant we walked through the door. Work took a little longer, but we are paying the bills these days, with enough left over to have some fun now and again. Not bad for a couple of aging gypsies.

But the real adventure was not settling into Seattle; it was the trip here, and the high point of our travels, was our stop in Malta, Idaho.

Saturday, October 27, last year, just after midnight, we had drifted into a truck stop outside of Ogden, Utah, to nap for a couple of hours. We were back on the road by two a.m., and neither of us thought to top off the tank before we left. Ninety minutes later, on an empty stretch of Interstate 84 in southern Idaho, we were cursing our carelessness.

Desperate for gasoline, certain we didn’t have enough fuel to make it to Twin Falls, we spotted an exit sign and saw high-pressure sodium glowing like faery light; we left the interstate and headed for Malta.

The sign at the village limits said 184 souls lived there; but at 3:40 a.m., the place looked like a well-lit ghost town. On Main Street, we found the Malta Fuel Depot -- two pumps, a convenience store and a bait shop. It was closed; the sign said the place opened on Saturday at 7:30 a.m. Four hours away. We planned to cross over into Oregon about then; instead, it seemed we would be in Malta, praying that the Fuel Depot opened on time.

And then, Rachael did something that never would have occurred to me if I had considered the situation for the rest of my life.

“The light on that pump is on and it has a card reader,” she said. She opened the car door. “Let’s see if it will take my credit card.”

I tried to stop her. I worry about most everything and I have a grand imagination; not a good combination. I had visions of large policemen springing from hiding, guns drawn; I saw the two of us – who do not fit the demographic for Malta, Idaho, in any way – being led to parts unknown, our SUV pushed off a canyon rim and our two cats left to find their own kibble.

Rachael wouldn’t listen. She marched up to that pump, slid in her card – and it worked. No cops. No sirens. No worries. Five minutes later, we were back on the interstate, with a full tank of gasoline bought and paid for; giggling like a couple of first-time drunks. And by the time the Malta Fuel Depot opened for business, we were crossing the state line; thinking about breakfast and about to discover that pumping your own petrol in Oregon is against the law.

So, from a distance of seven months and seven hundred miles, I want to thank the operator of the Malta Fuel Depot. I don't know if you forgot to turn off the pumps that Friday night, or if you leave them on 24/7 for the early risers in town. Whichever, it was the difference between disaster and delight.

And that is what adventure is about, isn’t it? Taking chances, latching onto serendipity and celebrating victory -- even over such a small thing as a full tank of fuel.