Trendy But Casual

The Scudder Road Circus Presents Travel Tips: The Red Carpet Club at LAX

Yes, the Scudder Road Circus is on the road again, taking its animal- and act-free self around the globe to bring pleasure to untold dozens of people, largely by rivaling Frommer’s, Fodor’s, The Rough Guide, National Geographic, The Dead Sea Scrolls, etc, with its insider travel knowledge and up-to-the-moment advice.

The first installment was going to be about Oaxaca, Mexico, until swine flu spoiled everything, so here’s something much more exotic: the old RCC in Terminal Seven, LAX.

1.     On a Saturday morning, the Red Carpet Club is the perfect place to a) get some work done on one of six (count them) public desks; b) to enjoy a selection of breakfast cereals in incredibly tiny bowls, with a choice of skim milk or 2%; c) spot people who may or not be celebrities, because it’s hard to tell if they’re actual celebrities or just people from LA who have expensive clothes and small, taut bodies; and d) spot people who may be important  government figures, based on the number of newspapers they’re reading (three), and the number of secret service guys in good suits and lapel badges lurking nearby (three), and the way they refer to the President as “Barack.”

2.      If you don’t like cereal, don’t worry, because by noon it’s replaced with the RCC’s traditional native cuisine of greasy cubes of cheese, a selection of dusty crackers, and a platter of stunted, torpid vegetables arranged around dip of obscure provenance and gluey consistency.

3.     Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the secret service guys, who stare at you each time you glance over at the mysterious government figure, muttering to each other as though they are about to detonate your laptop and cell phone the second you wander off to pour a cup of lukewarm tea.

4.     Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the desk staff, who are dealing with a long line of upset people wanting to get into the RCC or upgrade or get a different flight.  Sometimes this is hard, especially when the United representative shouts “STEP BACK INTO THE PUBLIC AREA, SIR!”

5.     When you watch episodes of “30 Rock” on Hulu, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the guy at the next desk watching “24” on his laptop, or the way he turns around to glare at you for laughing aloud.

6.     When you watch episodes of “30 Rock” on Hulu, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the ads they stick in for Foundation Rwanda, ads which involve plaintive children, especially if they remind you of the child in Mali who you’re sponsoring through Save the Children, the child to whom you’ve never written despite being urged to do so, at regular intervals, by the guilt merchants at STC.

7.     Don’t worry if a lot of people in the RCC are wearing surgical masks, reminding you that swine flu is rampant across the world, and that you have neglected to take proper precautions – i.e. you’ve got your mini Walgreens-brand  “Instant Hand Sanitizer Spray”, and that’s it, because Walgreens had sold out of everything else, and the woman who was helping you basically mocked you for being the last person in town to wander in looking for pandemic-flu-repellant products.

8.     Resist the temptation to steal a copy of today’s Guardian off a sleeping, snoring man. Resist feeling irritation about the lack of international papers on sale at this airport – the lack, in fact, of anything much aside from the LA Times and pretend newspaper USA Today.

9.     Focus instead on the twenty free copies of Ski magazine displayed on a nearby rack. Wish you found reading about skiing interesting. Wonder if you will ever go skiing in your life, and suspect that you will not.

10. Count the minutes until you can leave the RCC, walk over to Terminal Two, check in for your evening flight on Air New Zealand, and then find sanctuary in the Koru Club. Entertain the usual brief, disturbing fantasy that the rules will have changed since you last flew, and that the Koru Club door police will wave you and your RCC card away. Know that if this happens you will pay, on the spot, for Koru Club membership, because it’s still more than seven hours until your flight, and because this is LAX, with its Jetsons-like unlinked terminals, you will not be able to return to Terminal Eight and the RCC.  Maybe then you’ll realize what you’ve lost, and how early it is, how early.

Of Airlines, and Their Wicked Ways

It’s a new year, and I know it should be a forgive-and-forget, looking-ahead, making-resolutions time. It’s also ages since I wrote, and I have lots of pictures – of Christmas, of our trip to Paris – to post. But first I must get all this hatred for airlines (or “evil-doers”, as I now think of them) out of my system. This post will be long, and over-detailed, because I have a lot of venting to do.

As the constant reader knows, I’ve done lots of flying about this year. Too much, perhaps. There have been some highlights, like getting upgraded to whatever Air New Zealand calls business class these days, after the bird-strike/Victoria Beckham incident this summer. Of course, in order to enjoy that particular highlight, I had to spend the night in an airport hotel, without luggage, and spend c. eight hours in the Koru Club at LAX, looking forlorn and disheveled. I’m trying to think of any other highlights, but that’s about it, aside from the time they brought around a tray of Afghan biscuits in the Koru Club, and perhaps the time they let us board late in Auckland so we could watch New Zealanders winning Olympic medals in rowing.

Lowlights, however, have been ample. Often they involve these so-called partnerships between airlines, and lead to a conversation like this:

United person: Here is your boarding pass for the LA flight. You’ll have to get the boarding pass for your international travel when you arrive at LAX.

Me (thinking of time it takes to catch bus to other terminal, stand in line at check-in, etc, and worrying about tight connection, chance of losing my seating assignment and getting stuck in a middle seat for twelve hours WHICH HAS HAPPENED BEFORE): Why can’t you issue it? It’s all on the same ticket, and Air New Zealand is part of the Star Alliance.

United: Because you didn’t book the ticket through United.

Me: But when I fly from New Zealand, they give me both boarding passes, even when I don’t book the ticket through Air New Zealand.

United: We cannot issue a boarding pass for another airline, even a partner airline, unless you book the whole ticket through United. Now go away and enjoy the lack of facilities in Louis Armstrong Airport, like the PJs coffee house that closes at four, and don’t even think of visiting the Red Carpet Club, because we don’t have one.  [That last sentence was implied, rather than stated aloud.]

OK. So that’s the United rule. Except the next time I fly United, I’m given both boarding passes, even though I didn’t book the ticket through United. And then the time after that, I’m NOT given the second boarding pass. And so on. When I ask Air New Zealand about this, they say that United should issue the boarding pass. These two airlines need relationship counseling.

Other United lowlights: no food served on the three-and-a-half flight from LAX to New Orleans, though they do offer lame “snack boxes” for sale – nothing like a sandwich, say, because the flight is too short. No free drinks served on international flights, as we discovered flying to London: you’ll need to cough up six dollars. And, as T. Middy found out on his fourteen-hour flight to Sydney, no TV-screens-in-seatbacks, just four movies played back to back on those small cabin screens. (Note to United: this is why we usually fly with partner airlines.)

And this conversation, when I was checking in for my flight back to New Orleans at LAX in September, after spending the night there: at certain times of year, apparently, there is no way you can fly in from New Zealand and get back to New Orleans on the same day, even via Denver.

Me (after the machine has told me it’s too late to check in): Excuse me, I’m not being allowed to check in, but it’s more than an hour until my flight leaves.

United person (in nasty and sarcastic tone): You better check your itinerary, ma’am.

Me (producing itinerary, feeling flustered): Here it is, see?

United (reading itinerary, saying nothing at all, not changing facial expression, printing out boarding pass, handing it to me, tagging my luggage, not saying anything at all. Not a word.)

My flight time had changed to forty minutes or so earlier, and an e-mail had been sent to me in the middle of the night. But that morning I didn’t check e-mails: I got straight into the shuttle van for the airport, and then spent two hours driving around Los Angeles. I don’t think airlines should count on people having internet access at all times, especially when they’re in transit. And – call me old-fashioned – I think that people who work in Customer Service should be polite and helpful, rather than surly and bitter. Or at least they should know how to mask their bitterness, the way waitresses and teachers do.

Today I checked my Mileage Plus account, and discovered that at least four trans-Pacific trips are missing, as well as the trips to Sydney and all the trips to Wellington, though I know my account number was in the system. To ask for these (more than 30,000 miles) to be credited, I have to supply ticket numbers and seating assignments. So now it’s play hunt-the-boarding-pass time. This may be Air New Zealand’s fault. United can’t be THAT bad.

Not when there’s Delta and Air France. These two airlines make United/Air NZ look like exemplars of marital bliss. Delta and Air France are in some sort of alliance, but it’s one of mistrust, non-communication, and mutual frustration. I think they may be about to break up. Maybe they should. Their relationship is extremely dysfunctional.

In October, when T. Middy and I decided to celebrate my return from the deepest south (and what he sulkily termed our “long-distance marriage”) by spending the New Year holiday in Paris, it all seemed very straightforward. We were going to be in St Louis for Christmas, so we’d fly out of St Louis on Boxing Day and connect at some more eastern point to a Paris flight. We could book the whole thing through Delta. We were routed through JFK on the way out, and through Atlanta on the return. I went online and chose all our seating assignments, including a group-of-two on one side of the Air France Airbus.

The amiable and generous Dinaw Mengestu offered us the use of his Paris flat, while he and his fiancée were in Ethiopia. We booked a hotel in St Louis for the night we returned, Friday. We left our car with the Middy family, and arranged to take TM’s mother out for lunch the next day, to celebrate her 80^th birthday. Actually, this was a ruse: we were charged with getting her to the surprise party TM’s sister was organizing. Our plan was to attend the party and then drive part of the way back to New Orleans, staying somewhere in southern Missouri that night, arriving home on Sunday afternoon.

Instead, this is what happened. On the outward leg, we got a taste of the chaos and eccentricity that is the Air France seating system. Five days before we left, TM called Air France to check on our seating assignments. He was told that we had none at all, and the seats I’d booked back in October were unbookable, because they were always reserved (for unclear reasons). But we could have another pair, in a nearby row, so everything would be fine. Except maybe it wouldn’t, because at this point it was too close to the day of travel.

When we checked in at St Louis, about eight hours before our Paris flight was due to leave from JFK, we found we’d been separated and placed on different sides of the plane. The Delta agent shrugged, and said we’d have to speak to the Air France agent at JFK. So there we lined up for some time in the general melee, watching while agent after agent closed up his or her counter, until it was down to two people working. The guy who helped us, at last, was very nice and tried to help, something we found of most of the Air France employees at JFK and at Charles De Gaulle. But he couldn’t get us seats together. The flight was very full, he said, and there was the business of “unlocking” seats, which he couldn’t do; the reservations we’d made in October, and the conversation we’d had earlier in the week, meant nothing.

While we were waiting near the gate, I called Delta and Air France to investigate. The Air France agent said she couldn’t access our reservation at all because we’d booked through Delta, even though the agent T. Middy had dealt with earlier in the week had been able to call up the booking without a problem. The Delta agent said that the flight was not very full, so not to stress out – we’d be able to get reassigned once the unlocking took place. I told her that the flight was, in fact, very full. She said she couldn’t see that on her system. Also, she told me, I shouldn’t worry about the return journey, because that flight wasn’t full either. When I expressed doubt about her ability to see into the dark heart of the Air France booking system, she called an Air France agent, and told me that our seating request for the return flight had been duly noted. But Delta could never do anything but request seat assignments, because it was all up to Air France. I asked her if this meant that we should have booked through Air France rather than Delta, but she said it all came down to the eleventh-hour unlocking of seats. I don’t think anyone actually knows what this means, but a lot of airline employees talk about it the way people in the Middle Ages might have referred to the onset of the Black Death, as mysterious and depressing and beyond anyone’s control.

And Air France, I’ve learned, loves to lock up those seats. We saw some friends from London when we were in Paris, and they said they’d had the same experience on a flight to Bordeaux: their family of five had been separated, despite having booked seats together, and there was much talk of the drama of unlocking and its total impossibility. Later, at CDG, I was talking to an American who said he, his wife, and their small child had all been separated on an Air France flight to India, even though they thought they’d secured seating assignments together. It seems there’s nothing anyone can do about it, not even check in hours in advance, because all the mystical unlocking goes on at the last minute.

Finally, at the gate, an agent instantly gave us seats together, a pair of two by the window. Unlocked – voila!  The flight was very full, but we could sit together in the newly unlocked area. We were happy at last. The food was pretty good on board, the best Economy airline food I can remember. Drinks were free, including an aperitif of champagne, and there were TV screens in our seatbacks. Our bags arrived; we bought tickets and caught the train into Paris without a problem. We then had a lovely holiday, which I will talk about in another, happier post.

And then: the long journey home. On Friday morning, we returned to CDG, arriving several hours before our flight was due to depart. Too late! The flight was over-booked, we were told, and we would have to go on standby. A lot of people around us were hearing the same thing. Nobody was happy. The stress of the situation was exacerbated by the insanely long time it took to get through Immigration (more than 30 minutes in a queue of hundreds of people, with only two people checking passports) and Security (another half an hour, though at least they don’t make you take off your shoes). At the gate, everyone was standing in various snaking lines, for no apparent reason, as the flight was delayed and nobody was allowed to board for almost an hour. One agent tried to deal with all of us left-behinds, including several families – two of which had a mixture of seats and standby notices.  Everything depended, we were told, on people transferring from other flights: if their flights were delayed arriving, some of us would be able to wriggle on.

After everyone boarded, she told us only three could wriggle on: the two standby members of one family, who looked beyond relieved, and a fifteen-year-old boy traveling alone. The rest of us would have to stay overnight at an airport hotel; they’d try to find us flights for the next day. This process, of sitting in another area, waiting while the agent assigned to us tried to get us seats on a flight home, took hours. By the time we had our boarding passes for Saturday, it was getting dark outside. I used the ten-minute phone card I was given to call the hotel in St Louis and re-book for Saturday. TM sent a Blackberry message to his sister telling her we were going to miss the surprise party. The agent kept coming to talk to us, asking for ideas of other cities where we could connect to St Louis – I suggested JFK and Dulles. Some time later she returned: she could get us to the US, but not on any connecting flight. Finally, in exasperation she pleaded with her supervisor to unlock some seats on the Atlanta flight, and this worked. Of course, it meant that we were bumping people with reservations for the next day, just as we’d been bumped that day.

Another night in Paris doesn’t sound bad, I know. But we didn’t have another night in Paris: we had a night at the Park Inn outside Roissy-en-France. T. Middy was sick: he’d almost thrown up on the train that morning, and was clammy, feverish, and nauseous. And our luggage had been checked and could not be retrieved. So we went to the Park Inn, part of a charmless industrial park of jerrybuilt hotels ten minutes drive away, a hotel so given to primary colors it appeared to be made of LEGO. We had our free dinner, which was OK, particularly the free-glass-of-wine part, and listened to everyone else in the dining room complain about getting bumped from their flights. (“Welcome Air France!” read the sign outside the restaurant.) TM needed to sleep, and we’d decided to get to the airport first thing in the morning, just in case. It’s not a bad place to spend time – attractive, not noisy, you can get manicures and/or decent sandwiches – and there were no major lines at Immigration this time.

We got on the full plane – avoiding the gaze of the angry and despairing people clustered around the stand-by desk, complaining that they had reservations, that their families could not be separated, etc – and arrived in Atlanta more or less on time. In Atlanta we had about half an hour of false hope. “This is so much better than LAX and JFK,” we told each other. The TSA workers seemed non-belligerent and willing to speak. (Elsewhere, they favor curt nods, rolled eyes, and other minimal gestures over actual language, unless they’re shouting at people who don’t speak English.) The lines were long, but moved swiftly. Our bags came out right away, and there were helpful people to point us to the transfer area. We went through security again right away, without having to ride to another terminal.

But on the other side of security, it was a different story. We had no boarding passes for the flight to St Louis, because Air France said it couldn’t issue them. Of course they couldn’t. But we were booked onto the next flight, and had a piece of paper to prove it. I joined the line of over 50 people at the Delta desk, many of whom had missed connections and were frantic, trying to get to overseas destinations. Someone at the Info desk told TM we should just go to the gate. I’d just overheard this conversation in the line.

Desperate Passengers: We’re trying to get on the flight to Puerto Rico!

Delta guy, working the line: You can get your boarding passes at the gate.

DPs: We were just there, and they wouldn’t give us anything! They said we had to line up here.

Delta guy: You go back there, and tell them to give you your boarding passes.

DPs: What if they say no?

Delta guy: You tell them that THE SUPERVISOR SAID TO GIVE YOU YOUR BOARDING PASSES.

DPs: What is your name?

Delta guy: Just tell them THE SUPERVISOR.

I whispered to TM, as we ran to our gate, that we could mention that THE SUPERVISOR thing if necessary. It wasn’t, as it turned out. Not that we had seats on the flight. Oh no. The Delta agent told us the following: that there was no record of us on this flight; that the piece of paper we had from Air France was, in effect, so much meaningless nonsense; that we weren’t even on standby, though she would add us to the long, long list; and that it was a very full flight and we were unlikely to get seats.

But we did, after a tense wait while everyone else was seated and all the other standby names were called. And on the flight itself, we especially enjoyed the announcement made towards the end. There’d been turbulence, so the drinks service had been abandoned. The flight attendant wanted to apologize to those of us – most of us – who did not get the chance to get, as she said, “a cup of water, or … or a hot drink.”

So much for an aperitif, T. Middy said; now we’re reduced to “a cup of water,” which we don’t even get.

At St Louis, it was busy, busy, busy, and the baggage took ages to appear on the carousel. Not our bags, of course. They were AWOL. In the Delta baggage office, small and crowded, we waited our turn. The agents there were clearly tired from dealing with the annoyed general public. They were snippy and frowning. One of them raised her voice when some non-English-speakers didn’t know how to describe the color of their missing bags. The man gestured at his jacket sleeve. “IS THAT BROWN OR GREEN, SIR? BROWN OR GREEN?” We were next. We handed over our luggage receipts. She looked at them as though they were Tarot cards, maybe, or missives from an alien planet. She could not deal with Air France receipts, she said; we’d have to wait for the other agent.

We waited. The other agent explained that Delta had no record of our luggage, because it had been checked by Air France, and their numbers did not compute with the Delta system. Did we see it in Atlanta? Good. Because otherwise, Delta would have no clue as to the whereabouts of any of our bags. Maybe our luggage would arrive on the next flight, around midnight, or maybe not. Delta could not tell us. We’d have to wait until the morning. After some sob-storying from us, the agent said she’d call us on T. Middy’s cell phone if the bags came in that night. We decided that if she called, we’d come back from the airport hotel to retrieve them.

There was no call, so when we got up on Sunday morning it was Day Three for the clothes. After more than 48 hours without a shave, TM was developing a beard, which he alleged was George Clooney-esque. You be the judge.

He called the 800 number we’d been given, and was on hold for half an hour. (We couldn’t check online, because we hadn’t taken our computers to France. It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.) Good news: our bags were in St Louis. They’d arrived last night. Thanks for calling, Delta agent!

So that’s about it. We caught the shuttle back to the airport; we retrieved our bags, returned to the hotel, and got to change our clothes. TM shaved off his grizzly whiskers. We visited the Middy family to collect the car, pack up all the Christmas gifts, and hear about the 80^th birthday party we missed. Then we drove for ten hours so we could get home in time for TM to go to work on Monday morning.

Here are the luggage tags of meaninglessness.

I don’t want to fly again any time soon. I have to go to Chicago in February for the AWP conference, and I’m paying more to get a direct flight. Also, I’m only taking hand luggage, even if it means dressing like Heidi en route. I’ll probably get snow-bound, or diverted to various regional airports. Or else there’ll be so much turbulence, I won’t even get my cup of water.

One good thing about all this, that we’ll appreciate long after all the hassle of the trip back is forgotten, more or less: the 1200 Euros in compensation we received from Air France for getting bumped off our original flight. This will cover our excessive eating and drinking for the week in Paris, turning what was an extravagant holiday into something approaching a cheap one. We were offered a choice – 600 Euros each in cash, paid into a credit card, or a travel voucher for 800 Euros each. Sorry Air France, but we’re in no hurry to fly with you again. Despite the aperitifs.

And now, after all this complaining, here are some pictures of our place decorated for Christmas. These were taken just before our party, the one day of the year when most of the apartment is tidy, and the piles of magazines are exiled to the back room. All of this should have come down today, I know: it’s carnival season now, time to move on.

Christmas, St Louis

 

Let me see … the temperature is in single digits (Fahrenheit), my nose is bleeding, and yesterday we sat for an hour and ten minutes in stopped traffic trying to get out of a shopping mall’s parking garage. We must be in St Louis.

St Louis, fan-shaped city of churches and supermarkets, beer and blight, two big rivers, numerous major highways,  and an excess of big malls and sports franchises. How I love your Nordstrom’s! How annoying is it that Highway 40 is closed right now? It’s quite complicated to get to the major retail cluster I know as the Axis of Evil on and around Brentwood (the Galleria, Crate & Barrel, Whole Foods, World Market, Borders, Target, and so on).

We’re staying downtown, which is sort of like Chicago without the rivers and stairs. The business district is trying to revive itself, apparently, from the torpor afflicting many American downtowns, so construction/renovation work is going on, despite the frigid cold, and buildings like the one we’re staying in – the former Board of Education, built in 1891 – are being converted to loft apartments.  Our loft apartment on the corner of Locust and Ninth overlooks a plaza-in-progress, poetically described by T. Middy as “concrete with trees.”

We stayed down here once before, Christmas 2000, in the Omni Hotel. We appeared to be the only guests. When a light bulb blew in our room, we called down to the desk: some breathless man in street clothes turned up forty minutes later brandishing the bulb, and we suspected he’d driven from home. It snowed that year, and the streets outside were white and silent.

It’s livelier down here these days, though lively is a relative term, especially now, with everything closing for Christmas. There’s a City Grocery around the corner. Yesterday we walked to Macy’s to look at the window displays, but it was too cold to linger, and Macy’s itself was quiet and a little dispiriting. Later we discovered that everyone in St Louis was at West County Mall, trying to get in and out of the parking lot, and crowding out the Apple store.

Apart from trying on shoes at Nordstrom, my favorite thing to do in St Louis – and note I’m opting for American spelling, because T. Middy tells me it’s my patriotic duty – is go to the movies. I especially like the Tivoli in University City, and the little cinemas at Plaza Frontenac mall. But I don’t think we’ll have time for movies this year. I’m cooking English Christmas dinner for the Middy family here in the loft, which means we drove up from Louisiana with a car full of pots, dishes, wrapped gifts, food, alcohol, a fake Christmas tree, outfits for every occasion, etc (“like the Clampetts,” according to TM). Today we have to pick up the turkey at the Smokehouse Market in Chesterfield, so I can begin slavishly following the diktats of Nigella (brining the turkey, making the giblet gravy, etc).

We’ve already been to Global Foods Market in Kirkwood, my favorite supermarket anywhere in the US. It’s a fantastic place for Asian produce and ingredients, as well as things like chestnut puree, caster sugar, golden syrup, and a dozen different sorts of orange marmalade. The only thing we weren’t able to get there was sponge cakes for the trifle: they’d had 20 dozen, the manager told us, but all had sold, so I’ll have to make my own. I’m not inflicting Christmas pudding on the Middy family this year. Like Marmite, it’s an acquired taste, I think, though they’ve been polite and plucky about it before – even the year we got carried away with the burning brandy, and had to beat out the blue flames dancing across my sister-in-law’s new kitchen table.

T. Middy is full of Christmas spirit, blasting Bing Crosby through the apartment, and saying things to me like “No, you cannot buy The Essential Toto,” and “How can you go on The Amazing Race when you can’t even get the cap off the shampoo bottle?” He hasn’t even thanked me for not forcing him to grate suet this year.

Hard to think I was still in New Zealand at the beginning of this month, and that we’ll be in Paris at the end of this week. The weeks in between were consumed with the following: Christmas cards, cooking, references, and our party. And finishing revisions on my YA novel, which comes out next year. And standing in line in the Post Office on Louisiana Avenue, which did not feel obliged to have more than two people working at any given time, despite the long queues, or to have a supply of overseas stamps (I had to use three different stamps on most cards to make up the required postage), or, in fact, to have enough of anything: on my last visit, a handwritten NO HOLIDAY STAMPS sign was stuck on the door.

And a few days after I mailed cards to the UK, we got a call from a woman in Staten Island, New York. The card I’d sent to my friend Bridgit in London had ended up at this unknown woman’s house in New York, even though the envelope had correct overseas postage, an airmail sticker, and an address that read London, UK with the right post code.  None of this information deterred the US Mail from delivering it to someone with the same street name in an outer borough of New York. Happy Christmas!

We have photos of our house looking tidy and over-decorated, but they’ll have to wait. The turkey must be collected before freezing rain starts falling. Also, listening to “Christmas in Killarney” is giving me a headache.

Long Journey Home

In case I didn’t think flying from Cork to London to Washington DC to New Orleans on Sunday was bad enough – almost 24 hours of racing around – I made the mistake of leaving again almost immediately for New Zealand, on Tuesday afternoon.

It was the usual semi-chaos at New Orleans airport, where I was given a “flight management” card (I think – I’ve blotted this out of my memory already) instead of a boarding pass. This led to half an hour of anxiety at the gate, waiting to hear if I had an actual seat on the plane. I guess they were over-booked. I got myself completely wound up, because I needed to catch that flight in order to make my connection to Auckland in LA.

Or so I thought.

On arrival, while hurtling through the terminal to do the usual LAX shuffle (catch the bus to Terminal Two, search out a working escalator, check in again at the Air NZ counter to get my boarding pass, wait forever to get through security, etc), I listened to my voicemail: an urgent message from Air NZ. Apparently, a bird had flown into the plane’s propellers – official description: “bird strike” – yesterday, which meant repairs had to be undertaken today; the plane had just managed to set off for London. Which meant it wouldn’t be flying to Auckland tonight.

So: an overnight stay at the LAX Hilton, complete with vouchers for the buffet dinner, breakfast, and lunch. I’ll gloss over the delights of the Hilton buffets. Wine is not included, needless to say. (I bought my own.) Because I never learn the lesson of missing luggage – mine, checked through to Auckland, was held to ransom overnight at LAX – I had a hour-long walk today there and back to the nearest drug store, along Sepulveda Boulevard, a street name I now discover I’ve been mispronouncing for years.

I should have learned by now not to check crucial items like foundation, deodorant, and my cell phone charger, but clearly there is no lesson so vital in life that I manage to remember it.

Today I got some work done in the room, then made my way back to the airport around 4 PM: we were told to be here no later than 6:30, but the Air NZ guy yesterday told me earlier was better, given the crush. He wasn’t wrong: even arriving earlier, it took me an hour to check in and get through security. The latter was vintage LAX – it included having to line up OUTSIDE THE TERMINAL and, twenty minutes later, just as I’d unpacked my computer, shoes and toiletries, the security gate breaking down.

But it was only when I arrived here that I discovered the flight was not boarding at 7:30, as we were told, but at 11 PM. That’s 1 AM Thursday New Orleans time. I left home for the airport at 3 PM yesterday, Tuesday. There’s still an eleven-hour flight to come. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for way too long. By the time I actually get to Auckland, I’ll be so zonked I may forget to buy duty-free.

At least at LAX there’s the haven of the Koru Club, which kicks the Red Carpet Club’s ass in every respect. The staff are friendly; the drinks are free. There’s a decent array of food, and there are showers. If only there were laundry facilities and beds, I would be happy to camp out here for some time. One person, however, was told off for walking around without shoes, after which I guiltily slipped on my own. The local staff member chatting to me explained that it was a liability issue. Someone might step on some glass and sue. I explained that in New Zealand everyone is used to running around in bare feet. She looked incredulous.

The guy who checked me in also told me I only have one luggage tag, rather than one for each of the bags I checked in New Orleans yesterday. Both of those bags better make it onto this flight. It’s good to have something to worry about for the next eighteen hours.

I’m sorry these posts are so dull and non-literary. I am dull and non-literary myself at present; I’m simply a travel monkey. As soon as I get home, I will assume literary mode, whatever that is. And I’ll post some pictures of Ireland – really. 

Transit

Here in the airport in DC, Obama and McCain souvenirs are on sale – T-shirts , mugs, stickers, figurines. There’s an odd cardboard cut-out of McCain outside the store I passed. I hope it isn’t life-size: if it is, McCain may be too small to be president.

I’m in the big, crowded RCC at present, enjoying the faint Internet signal, and free cheese and crackers. The man sitting next to me on the flight from New Orleans snored the whole way. (And no, it was not T. Middy. He’s not flying until next week.) 

In Iowa City, the river is rising, People are sandbagging along the rims of campus and preparing for evacuation; water has crested the Coralville dam. Stay safe, everyone.

Travel Without Cards

I’m about to set off overseas again, though this time returning will be easier – I hope. My Gre.en Ca.rd has been confiscated and I now have a US passport (with a scary orange picture: I don’t know what they did to it) applied for and issued on the same day. When I came back from New Zealand in May, my GC had already expired and the “naturali-zation pending” stamp in my passport caused consternation. I was ushered to the dreaded Secon.dary In.spection area, with which I’m familiar from the old days – sometimes it’s like stumbling into an abyss where time has no meaning. An Air New Zealand official came in to check on me. “What are YOU doing here?” he asked, and when I explained, he wandered off. It’s not the kind of place you want to hang around. You feel guilt by association.

It didn’t take long on that occasion – probably about twenty minutes of waiting to have my passport and other documents checked, i.e. less time than it took to get through Cu.stoms afterwards with my bag. Even though there were three international flights in the baggage hall at once, LAX saw fit to have only two people working at the Customs checkpoint. I’ll be going through LAX a lot this year, so will save my rants (slow security lines, broken escalators, endless waits for buses to get to other terminals, lack of facilities, etc) for future posts.

But now I don’t have to worry about cards and extra documents. I will not experience conversations like the one I had with a Cus.toms official on my way back from the UK in March.

Him (checking my customs form): How long do you intend to stay in the US?

Me: I live here.

Him (outraged): You LIVE here?

Me: Yes. I’m a perm.anent resi.dent.

Him: Oh. Welcome home, ma’am!

Now, I assume, I’ll just get the ‘welcome home’ bit. Of course, I still have card issues. In March I joined United’s Red Carpet Club for the year, because I’d be flying to the UK twice and to New Zealand four or five times, with a lot of time to kill in Washington Dulles, Heathrow, LAX, Auckland, etc. I wanted to be able to get work done and spend the hours I have to hang around somewhere vaguely pleasant. I printed out my a membership confirmation from the Internet, and didn’t think much more about it.

Until I traveled to New Zealand in May. I couldn’t use the RCC during the March trip to London, because I was flying BA (not a partner airline) and was in a different terminal. But this May, when attempting to infiltrate the Koru Club in Auckland Airport, and then the RCC in LAX, I discovered that a) my temp membership form was no longer valid; it had expired in April; and b) my United Premier card, which can also get me in (the front desk person has to look up my FF # for confirmation I’m a member), has expired as well. Luckily, I managed to talk my way into both (harder at the RCC, oddly enough, where the person was very suspicious). But I called United when I got back to ask for both cards to be mailed ASAP. I was told they’d be here in four-to-six weeks, which is ASAP in United-land. (Funny: I couldn’t send them the $400 it cost to join the RCC in four-to-six weeks – I had to pay up right away.)

So on Wednesday, I’ll have to talk my way into the RCC in Dulles: “Here’s my invalid membership confirmation, and my invalid card: would you let me in, please?”

Cards I CAN take with me to London: my beloved Oyster card, and my new British Library card, which features the worst-ever picture taken of me. I look recently exhumed from the grave. My skin is ashen, and my eyes appear to have been pecked by birds. I showed the evil person taking it (with a desk-bound digital camera positioned several feet below my chin) my old BL card. “Look how cute this picture is,” I told him. “I want another picture like this one.” He was unmoved.

On an unrelated topic, there’s a storm of annoyance over the announcement of finalists in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards: you can read the irritated comments over at Beattie’s Book Blog. This year’s judges have chosen only four titles for the fiction shortlist rather than the usual five, even though there were many strong, well-reviewed novels and short story collections published in New Zealand last year, and they had 35 books to choose from. Everyone is angry – publishers, authors, booksellers. It’s our version of the Booker Prize, and the only six weeks of the year in which five literary titles get major promotion in the media, book stores, libraries, etc.

I have an article about this – and the fiction finalists themselves – coming up in the Listener, which goes on sale this Saturday. This is the fourth year I’ve written a feature about the Montana fiction finalists for the Listener. In the interests of disclosure, in two of those years, I had a novel eligible for shortlisting. I’d hoped that Hibiscus Coast would be shortlisted, but it wasn’t: I sucked it up, and moved on – as you do. This year, there was no chance of Trendy But Casual getting on the shortlist: I’m not even sure that my publisher submitted it for consideration. It’s a comedy set in New York, which involved the three Rs – romance, reality TV, and Rapstallion, a rap star with a pink-maned horse, who appears in a hip-hopera called “Mary Rappins.” It’s hardly a novel that screams NEW ZEALAND’S PREMIERE LITERARY AWARD. Though I’m very fond of it, of course, and urge you all to buy numerous copies for your friends and relations.

If I make it into the RCC at Dulles Airport tomorrow, I’ll post again from there. Or will those hallowed doors be closed to me as well?