I was just thinking that I would have to tell you our flight home from San Francisco was uneventful, but of course it wasn’t. That’s not how we travel.
Our flight home started with a cab ride that was positively batshit crazy. It wasn’t supposed to be a cab ride. The hotel supposedly had an airport shuttle that would pick us up at the front door. There was even one of those double-wide shuttle buses parked right outside the window of our room, so naturally we assumed that’s what would meet us at the curb after checkout in the morning. But shortly after eleven o’clock an all-black minivan with the oddly incongruous name of the Yellow Cab company painted across the door pulled up to the curb and out popped its Asian-American driver. Remember Egg Shen, the wizard slash bus driver in Big Trouble In Little China? That was our cab driver. “You going to the airport?” he asked us.
“Well, yeah, but …” was our amazingly eloquent answer.
“To the airport?” he repeated. “You going to the airport?”
“This is the airport shuttle?” My Darling B asked.
“To the airport, right,” he confirmed.
“So, just to make sure, ah – how much?”
There was no charge. It was the airport shuttle, after all. The hotel apparently kept the shuttle bus just for show.
The driver loaded our bags into the back of his van, we climbed into the passenger seats, and then he took off down the road like he was driving a bank robber’s getaway car. Almost immediately, his cell phone rang. He flipped it out and started jabbering into it through the bluetooth earpiece sticking out of his right ear while almost, but not quite managing to keep his cab between the white lines of whatever traffic lane he may have theoretically been driving in. When he was done with that call, he picked up his cell phone and made another call, and then another, talking with who I can only presume was his dispatcher about pickups at other hotels until we got to the airport, where he made a dramatic entrance by swerving at the very last moment through a gap between a couple of concrete Jersey barriers. I was sure he’d missed it and would have to find another way to get us to the terminal, but no.
Once we were inside, and after we made our way through the twisty-windie line to the check-in counter, our helpful agent, Edward, informed us that our check-through bag was overweight and we would have to either shift the stuff in our bags around until the check-through bag was under fifty pounds, or we would have to pay the overweight charge.
“How much is that?” My Darling B asked, just out of curiosity, I guess, because I know she had no intention of paying it.
“One-hundred dollars,” Edward informed us.
So we rolled the bags to the end of the check-in counter, cracked them all open and pretty much gutted them, flinging clothes and souvenirs back and forth to each other. The troublemakers in this scenario were three twenty-two ounce bottles of beer picked up in our travels and a fourth sixty-four ounce empty bottle of the type known as a “growler,” also picked up as a souvenir because it had an unusual shape and I thought it would look good in my brewery. I parked the big check-through bag on a scale and we started throwing stuff into it, trying various combinations of bottles and clothes until we got it below the magical limit of fifty pounds. Then we would try to latch the bag, fail, re-open it and re-shuffle the contents until finally it was not only not overweight, it weighed exactly fifty pounds and we could not only latch it, but we were reasonably sure it would stay latched.
The only other glitch in our trip home was that we weren’t seated together and no amount of sweet-talking from My Darling B could get the good employees of American Airlines to rearrange the seating. I sat directly behind B, so I entertained her and my fellow passengers during the four-hour flight home by doing things like sticking caterpillars down the back of her dress and dipping her pigtails in the inkwell.
This Is Drivel 