Hello Flower Friends…I’m setting down the flower shears and picking up a pen and a passport. Let’s see what happens…
then and now
I like how the new anti- counterfeit tech washes out three decades of wrinkles
I mean, I hope I’ll be traveling soon. Life events are conspiring lately to squash my naive dreams of visiting Europe of eating a baguette sandwich in La Jardin des Plantes and then hoisting beers the size of my torso in Munich. It has been 34 years since I set foot on the Europe and joy should be unconfin’d. I should be buying luggage clothing cubes and electrical adaptors. But not so fast, suddenly there are numerous home fires keeping me as busy as an an overworked Smokey the Bear. But then, just as suddenly, things start to calm down. I start to see glimmers of hope that the timing is okay, family members are okay, our passports are here and appear to be okay. “Whew,” I say, as I examine my Luftansa airline booking. It’s then that I noticed the dumbest thing.
Everyone, everywhere, even the Today Show, knows
Mercury retrograde starts August 23
Our flight departs on August 23, 2023. Seems innocuous but no. This is the first day of the Mercury retrograde. Incroyable! Dumkopf! Quelle idiot! How could I, of all people, make this rookie mistake?
I have been an astrology nerd since the days of Linda Goodman and the seductive flattery of her popular 1968 book Sun Signs (“Libra - your smile can melt a Hershey bar at 100 paces…”). Now in the midst of an online astro renaissance, it seems everyone has at least heard of a Mercury retrograde. Even the skeptics who stopped reading this post the moment I wrote the word “astrology,” know not to book travel at the start of one. But petit imbécile that I am, I did.
So I’m not in a confident head space right not, let’s just say. My fantasy trip, ruined because it’s August 23. It’s stupid, I know, I know. And truly I do know because I myself was born under a Mercury retrograde. Whether or not it’s a real thing, my life time has had all the Mercury retrograde signatures of bumpy travel, upended plans, miscommunications and do-overs, over and over again.
To get out of this funk, I breathe deep and tell myself: “this simply means more of the same nonsense I’ve lived with my entire life. How bad can this be?” So now, instead of worrying about a future I can not predict no matter how astrology YouTubers I subscribe to, I am now going to review a lifetime of travel travails that I somehow survived. And frankly, looking back on a long history of travel mishegoss and shenanigans, it appears I was born for this.
Here then is a montage of times St. Christopher himself had to work overtime to keep me bobbing like a cork through foreign terrains where I encountered train fugitives, atmospheric rivers, human stampedes and daylight monkey robberies:
my boyfriend now husband on a hike in the Monkey Forest. There are peanuts in his backpack. Don’t tell the monkeys.
Ubud, Bali - My boy friend and I set off for a hike in the Monkey Forest. We were on our way to a temple, I think, but the main mission was to see cute! monkeys for sure, I mean we brought a bag of peanuts with us because how cute! will it be when they eat out of our hands, right? They seemed to be waiting for us at the start of the trail; one lone monkey (as predicted, cute!) and then a Momma and Baby monkey (omg, cute x 2!).
I swear for a hot second
this was super cute
Then, pretty quickly we were surrounded by a highly organized gang of cute! monkeys who grew less cute! the closer they got. Goodness, but monkeys have sharp teeth! I had not noticed that before. One cute! guy in particular made it clear, showing off his shiny incisors, that they didn’t want one peanut, they wanted the whole bag. My boyfriend and I tossed the bag back and forth to keep it away from them as we walked along the trail. The entourage of monkeys trailing us grew into a little macaque mob and still this was cute! until, en mass, they leaped on him, pulled his hair, scratched his face and shirt. Thinking fast, he threw the bag into the forest and they dove after it. After some scrambling they found the bag and held it aloft as they ran off, making proud monkey noises. That part was, at least, cute!
They Walk Fast in New York
My Baby and me at the Chelsea Hotel
New York City - wait…which weird NYC story did I want to tell..? they are innumerable as any New Yorker will tell you. That city does mess with you. But another time I’ll share the living weird in NYC stories. This is a travel weird in NYC story. Here goes: so I was on the Bowery walking to McSorley’s pub to meet my husband for a beer. It had been a fun little work/vacation week but now we had just enough time for a drink and dinner before we caught an evening train home to DC. The phone rang and I heard the voice of my youngest child, my Baby, who we had sent home on a bus earlier that week. He was 17, plenty old enough to be home alone for a few nights, right?
“Mom…Mom…?” he said, not sounding at all right. “Mom…where? where’s my bike? I can’t find my bike Mom…” He started to cry. The phone was wrestled away from him and an adult voice informed me that they found my son lying on the street in front of their house, his bike mangled. He was clearly concussed, his arm was maybe broken. I better come get him.
No, I can’t come, I tell this Good Samaritan, I’m in New York and it’s almost Happy Hour. Well, I didn’t say that exactly but I felt like Worst Mother of 2017 when I told him I wasn’t home but that I would send someone. I made calls to my oldest Darling Boy who was at university not too far away and to my Saintly Neighbor and together they got My Baby to the hospital while I ran to the pub, smacked the beer out of my husband’s hand and cried “we are leaving now.”
After an excruciatingly slow taxi cab to Penn Station, we raced to the ticket window where we asked to get on an earlier train. Thank God! There was one leaving in 10 minutes. Just enough time to get some dinner. The food court was on the other side of a glass walled waiting area and as we scanned the counter at Zaro’s for dinner options, we heard a metallic crack! in the distance. I turned to see every single person in the waiting area drop to the ground. Parents threw themselves on their children. Then the unbelievable and unforgettable sound of thousands of feet as everyone in the world started running directly at us.
In the wave of humanity I lost my husband and found myself hiding behind some young traveler and his large back pack. Ashamed that I was using this poor kid as a shield, I forced myself into the center of Penn Station, convinced I was now a target, my brain short circuiting, my body bracing for a bullet, when my husband reappeared and grabbed my arm. We headed to the Madison Ave exit, stepping over abandoned suitcases, cell phones and spilled Jamba Juice as building employees slammed shut store-front iron gates and went into lock down.
We made it outside and sat on the curb to hyperventilate. Pretty soon I noticed a strange normality all around us. New Yorkers rushed by in their usual “more important places to be” mode. Groups of NY Nicks fans in jerseys merrily waltzed towards the arena. Cops in full riot gear and rifles suddenly appeared, but instead of racing inside, they stopped on the sidewalk, looked at the Penn Station entrance, looked at each other and then shrugged. I tried to ask the cop what happened but I was still out of breath. The cops left. We looked at our watches. Our train was leaving in 5 minutes. We picked up our things and ran back inside.
On the train all the passengers in our car became fast friends and frazzled compatriots. “What the hell was that?” we asked each other in unison. “Where the hell is the bar car?” We all needed a drink. As we sipped watery Amtrak cocktails we checked social media together and pieced together what happened. Cops on the tracks tried to subdue an unruly passenger and the taser (what? a taser? why?!) malfunctioned and went off like the sound of a gun. The crowd reacted the way every American has to react in this God awful video game we now live in: Tag! It’s the newest mass shooter event and you are it!
Safe on the train headed towards home we knew we were not it, thank God, but the adrenaline surging through our bodies did not know, so it took hours to calm down. We pulled our heads together as we enter Union Station, then hopped into a cab to get home to deal with that other crisis.
My Baby, who got out of NYC just in time to go dancing with a speed bump. He’s fine now and has cool scars to show off. Thanks to Neighborhood Saint Anne and his Big Brother who dropped everything to get him to the hospital.
Standing on the corner of Benson Arizona
okay, where was I this time…yes, on the Amtrak from Tucson, Arizona. My last trip before the start of Covid just a few months later. Foot loose and fancy free like people were back then, I took time off to visit my husband who was attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, then we enjoyed ourselves in Zion and visited friends in Tucson. Dear Husband had to then fly off to Detroit for the Auto Show and I decided I would take the long way home by train. I picked up tamales and a kale salad, got on board and settled into a seat with a table in the observation car, ready for some serious western scenery.
Stop # 1 - Benson Arizona. Get comfy folks, we’ll be here a while
I went back to get my book and came back to find some Dude sitting next to my table of food. “I have to sit here,” he explained, “I get car sick if I face the other way.” I gesture to all the other chairs facing his “right way,” but he ignored me. On the other side a new passenger sat down and cracked open a beer. It was 9:45 am. I picked up my things and moved to another table and then realized my kale salad was missing. Neither Dude answered my questions about the salad. Okay, not a great start but I still have my Tamales and I’m still raring to go. Let’s get this train rolling!
The first stop after Tucson on the Sunset Express, after 45 minutes of some stellar Saguaro cactus and road runner scenery, is Benson Arizona. Tiny little one-road town with an ice cream stand next to the train station. Adorable but not much to see. The train stopped, blocking the one road in Benson so that guy in the red shirt in the photo above had to wait to cross the street. He waited and waited while we sat and sat. After an hour or so, one of my neighbors looked out the window on the other side of the train and said, “hey, does that guy’s jacket say FBI?” Now we all got up and craned out necks to look out windows. Yep, a large crowd of people in orange jackets is down by the front of the train.
Hard to see but this is a crowd of cops and Feds, all of whom are plenty bored by whatever is taking so long
Soon after, a line of passengers started coming from the front cars and into ours, filling the seats and aisles around us. They don’t know what’s happening, they tell us, but the Feds boarded the train and started banging on the door of one of the sleeper cars.” Then they evacuated all the other sleeper cars and told people to move to the back, quickly. All of our faces pressed against the glass trying to see what the hell was going on up front. I saw one Fed on the platform talking earnestly to someone through a window. Other amateur gum shoe passengers cornered conductors and cafe car staff, demanding answers. Outside in Benson, a crowd of onlookers gathered at the ice cream stand. The man in the red shirt was still waiting to cross the street.
Finally we pieced together with hearsay from the staff, rumors from other passengers and too good to check facts: a fugitive from the law, a man who had threatened a judge and his family, was being tracked by the FBI. They were pinging his cell phone, located him on the Sunset Express, then made plans to apprehend him in Benson. Meanwhile, the Fugitive, a fast thinker apparently, looked out his window in time to see the Feds lined up on the platform. He then locked the door to his sleeper car. He may or may not have a gun on him. Incredibly, Amtrak staff told the Feds they do not have keys to unlock the sleeper doors.
“Well we know this much, don’t we?” an African American passenger announces to everyone in the observation car, “we know what color he is. If he had been a brother they would shot the door down by now.”
Another hour or so later, the Feds lead a white man off the train and into a waiting police car. We roll out of Benson. The man in the red shirt is long gone. So is my kale salad. I have my suspects but I’ve had enough of mysteries for one day.