Tales from the Road

So I went back to Iowa last weekend. Why isn't important and that isn't what I want to blog about. What I want to blog about is the trip there and back.

I flew out of my little airport. I usually don't and opt for SeaTac. Flying out of SeaTac means fewer plane changes and sometimes a direct flight. And with the airport shuttle, getting there isn't an issue. But I didn't book this flight so it wasn't up to me. My local airport is used heavily by Canadians. (From what I understand, it is more expensive to fly out of Canadian airports because there aren't government subsidies to pay for airport improvements--like in the US.) What does this mean? Lots of nice people.

Yes, Canadians are nice (unless they are in the Trader Joe's parking lot). In the security line I knocked over my suitcase and hit the guy in front of my in the back. I apologized profusely and he was all, "That's oookay." And then there's the accents. Canadian accents are weird. Weird in that people can be from the same city but have completely different accents. I can only assume this is due to Canada's international population and their pretty awesome embrace of everything multi-cultural. But for some reason, hearing the guy in front of me (while waiting for coffee) ask, "Is that real cheese or prooocessed cheese?" almost made me laugh out loud.

Anyway... I got on my flight, there were lots of Canadians. I flew to SeaTac. I flew to Denver. The floor under the seat in front of me was soaked with coffee which in turn soaked into the bottom of my bag. My crazy expensive totally awesome bag. I wasn't happy.

But still, this post isn't about that.

I grabbed a bland lunch of Itza Wrap Itza Bowl in the Denver airport. Then I made it to my gate where I found out I would be sharing a little bitty plane with the Iowa women's gymnastics team.

Now we are getting to my point.

Later I learned they were on the way back from a meet in Utah where they had placed second. They had flown to Vegas and rented vehicles. By the time they were in Denver, they were probably exhausted. But I didn't know that then. At that point, there was one girl who, if I had known her in real life, I probably would have loved her for her genuinely enthusiastic personality. But in an airport and little bitty plane? Not so much.

At the gate she was laughing and laughing and laughing. She had banged up her ankle running up the down escalator. Or as she kept saying, "I was, like, running up the, you know, down elevator." No matter how many times she explained it, she said elevator. And everyone around her said, "You mean escalator? Because it would be pretty difficult to run up the down elevator."

But this the gist of the story: "I was trying, you know, to, like, catch up with Ashley and Megan* and they were going up the elevator so I, like, ran up the down elevator. It was fine, like, until I got almost to the top, and, like, I slipped, and, like, fell. Megan and Ashely kept going, like you know, they didn't know me. One guy stopped to ask if I was okay, and I was all, 'I'm fine." But, like Ashley and Megan ignored me. Like anyone thought we weren't together. Like, we're dressed the same! [They were all wearing UofI uniforms.] But, I, like didn't even realize I was hurt until Ashley and Megan showed me. There was, like, blood on the escalator. We just, you know, left like nothing had happened."

This was all punctuated by laughing and whatnot. It was so great in so many ways I wish I'd recorded it. But what was almost better? When she wandered off to wreak more havoc on the escalators/elevators of Denver International, the coaches were all, "Is she gone? You should see her papers. She writes like the talks..."

On the plane, she was in the row in front of me and prior to take-off she was pretty much a tightly-wound spring. But at some point, the excitement must've gotten to her because she fell asleep halfway through the flight.

The trip home was uneventful until we landed in SeaTac and found out we had to sit on the tarmac because there was security breach. I got in Twitter and found out a guy had gone through the wrong door and set off the alarms. After an initial search for the guy, TSA couldn't find him and decided to evacuate two terminals (and close the gates). So there we sat. We didn't have to wait too long, though. My outbound slight was delayed, though, because of the backlog caused by the shutdown. The plane was there, but due to the number of planes on the tarmac, there was a problem/delay getting it to the gate.

I made it back about an hour late, and then had to wait for the one person responsible for getting luggage off the tiny plane to do his job. This takes a minimum of 20 minutes--another reason to not fly out of our country bumpkin airport.

I'm beginning to hate flying just because it takes so damn long to get anywhere (thirteen hour trip there; ten hour trip back) and the hassle of security. But the entertainment of the people you are forced to be with can, you know, like, sometimes make up for it.


*I have no clue what their names were, but Ashley and Megan are always good guesses.