TriumphAnt

And we’re off.

As is my post-trip custom in the age o’ blogs, I will now embark on a series of posts to recount, both for your vicarious enjoyment and for its insomnia curative powers, Tales of Travels. (Don’t complain. I could set up a Kodak carousel projector and invite you all over for slides – “This is the Pacific Ocean…”)

This time around, it’s a few short days spent in a very pleasant place at precisely the right time of year to be there – the Monterey / Big Sur area of the Great State of California.

Getting out of Ottawa

In post-trip hindsight, I can relax in the knowledge that pretty well the entire trip went beautifully, but surely I can be forgiven for thinking anything but when, from the moment I* arrived at the Ottawa airport, I was confronted by a long line of people waiting in the United Airlines Express line-up for which I’d arrived in the recommended 90-minutes-ahead-of-your-flight time frame.

* My other half had already been in California at a work-related conference and I was heading down to join her. Thus, the first part of the trip’s recollection will be pronoun-ed “I”. Around about the time my taxi driver, Mako, gets me to the San Jose Marriott in Neutral (read on), “I” will become “we”. But I’m already getting ahead of myself.

Back to the Ottawa airport line-up.

After half an hour – during which time not one single person in front of me moved up, one of the United agents finally came down the line to advise us that the line was stalled while they tried to make alternative arrangements for passengers who were scheduled to have departed on two earlier United flights, both of which had been cancelled. She then asked who in line was here for the noon flight. (Me!) This resulted in several of us being moved to a different line that very quickly started moving, no doubt much to the consternation of those whose earlier flights had been cancelled.

Clearing departure customs remains, for me, one of those little necessities that really makes the typical airport experience the single most joyless aspect of air travel. Having been selected for, and undergone, a “random” pat-down search; having gone through the great fun of removing my shoes and padding along an industrial-strength carpet whose textile strength (and corresponding lack of comfort) was clearly selected on the assumption that a herd of water buffalo would one day have to undergo the pre-boarding process, I moved next to an utterly humourless US Customs agent. He took a look at the card I had filled out, including having checked the box labelled “Pleasure” beside the “Are you travelling for business or pleasure?” question, and promptly asked me whether I was flying today for business or pleasure.

Then he looked at the four-digit number I had filled in beside “Flt number?” “That’s not your flight number,” he said.

“Pardon?” I replied.

“Where did you get that flight number?” he demanded, tapping the “Flt number?” part of the card furiously.

Well dang, you caught me, man. I just pulled the first four numbers I could think of and entered them on the card because my principal form of entertainment is messing with the heads of people who are allowed to wear guns to work.

Leaving what I wanted to say unspoken, I instead took out a copy of the Expedia.ca confirmation that my other half had given me when she originally booked the flight. Now it was my turn to point and I did, to the line that identified today’s date, “Depart Ottawa” and the United Express flight number – the number that I had also transferred to the card and which had so plainly aggravated the officer.

“Well…” he said, “that’s not the number for this flight. This is,” he said, pointing to a completely different “Flt number?” on the ticket I had received a half hour earlier from the ticket agent. Then he firmly scratched the new number onto the card with a ballpoint stick pen. Tossing the card onto a growing pile beside his computer monitor, he ordered me to “Have a nice day,” with not one iota of the sentiment that occasionally is known to creep into the expression. “You too,” I said, hoping that in my turn I was not letting any of the dripping sarcasm I felt show.

Out of the air and into O’Hare

Following that introduction, the flight itself was smooth and uneventful. After touchdown at my plane-change city, the flight attendant thanked us all for choosing United and welcomed us to some place called the “Chicagoland area”. This set me to wondering whether the entire United States is in the process of re-casting itself as an amusement park. Of course, I might have misheard and she might have been welcoming us to the “Chicago land area”, as opposed to the “Chicago water area”, which I suppose might have been the welcome had we landed a few miles short of the runway with a titanic splash in Lake Michigan. But I digress.

Things you do not want to hear while walking from the C Concourse en route to the B Concourse at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (number one in a series of one):

“Please be advised that the
Department of Homelands Security
has raised the threat advisory level
to ‘ORANGE’.”

Then, as you watch, you observe that not one person – not one… single… person – from among the hundreds in your field of view gives off any sign at all of doing anything even slightly different from what he or she was doing in the moments before that announcement was made.

So picking yourself up from beneath the steel bench under which you had flung yourself in a last, desperate effort to survive the blast and subsequent collapse of the massive roof, all the while wondering, “Is this why they call this building a ‘terminal’?”, you begin the long process of peeling months-old lumps of chewed gum off your shirt and proceed along the moving sidewalk to Concourse B.

And, before we take leave of Chicago’s airport, I also have a parting word for people who seem to think they are surrounded by an invisible telephone booth whenever they opt to use their cellphones: I don’t give the proverbial flying you-know-what for – to take just one example – the fact that you showed up on time for your meeting with “the engineer”, but he missed the meeting and you think it’s “probably because the $%#@$!! didn’t get laid last night”.

Really, I don’t care. Neither, I suspect, do the other two or three dozen people within earshot of your overloud conversation. Despite your apparent perception, the simple fact that you possess a cellphone does not make you important. In fact – simple fact, in fact – I have a great deal more respect for people who go out of their way (and mine) to be discreet about their cellphone conversations.

Got that? Thank you.

On to San Jose

Had I not taken note of the fact, not too long ago, that the popular Asian character actor Mako had passed away, I would have sworn he had chosen to slip into obscurity and take a quiet job driving an especially decrepit cab for a San Jose airport taxi company. Because the driver of the cab that sputtered up to the “Ground Transportation – Taxi” position looked exactly like this:

with the extra added feature of having so many leaky facial lesions that he looked to be preparing to audition for the most recent remake of Night of the Living Dead.

As we slowly chugged away from the airport, I noticed that his motor was giving off sounds of serious acceleration, but the physics of the process clearly was not making the connection to his wheels. While it sounded like it was reaching about 75 miles per hour, the speedometer registered barely 35 as we hit the freeway for the short trip into the downtown area.

But then he did quite one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen done with an automatic transmission. As we moved up the freeway ramp, he jiggled the shift lever and, when it fell into “N” the car gave a lurch that I am sure produced a G-force, because it chucked me back into my seat. At that point, whatever was not connected began to connect because the speedometer crept slowly up to about 50 miles per hour. (For anyone who might be unfamiliar with an automatic transmission, “N” means “Neutral”. In its most common configuration, it simply lets the engine run while the vehicle moves neither forward nor in reverse),

“Um… I think you might need a little transmission work,” I ventured. He grunted in reply.

My other half is a librarian. I mention that only because, during our brief trip, the driver asked what convention was at the Marriott. When I told him it was a meeting of librarians and staff who use a particular library software system, he asked, “Ahhhhhh... So they gonna talk about doo-ey dess-i-mah system?”

Then for a few seconds, he almost seemed to drift into another place as he said to no one in particular that whenever he had to go to the San Jose State University Library (where apparently the University and the Public Library share a building, albeit in separately designated spaces), he could always find what he was looking for because of the “doo-ey dess-i-mah system”.

Eat your heart out, Library of Congress system users!

We completed the rest of the drive with him keeping one hand firmly clamped on the shift lever, the position indicator clearly notched on the “N”, at what seemed close to appropriate speeds, until we reached the hotel where my other half had been attending her conference. I actually tipped him quite generously – whether in relieved gratitude or for a tube of industrial-strength Clearasil I would leave to his interpretation.

But he did recommend an excellent restaurant. Then he sputtered off in search of either a new passenger or a transmission repair shop. A few minutes later, my wife found me – somewhat tired and greatly relieved – in the hotel lobby and we began the vacation part of the trip.

With her being tired after a busy day of conferencing and me being tired after some six hours in the air, bracketed by all the ground time required to clear the boarding procedures and make the necessary connection in “Chicagoland”, we opted to take the taxi driver’s recommendation and walk to the restaurant, which turned out to be a mere half block from the conference hotel.

“Original Joe’s” is one of those quintessential American Italian places where a “serving” produces a plateful of food that would yield leftovers if placed before a family of eight in most other countries. The entire table-waiting staff consists of older gentlemen in tuxedo jackets who all look and speak like they just can’t wait for “Godfather on Broadway” to sweep into town auditioning for performers. It was in decided contrast with the garb of their typical customer, almost all of whom – like we – were dressed in summer holiday wear.

I had a linguine with pesto that was excellent. We also shared a half bottle of a very nice Chianti (Hey, whadd-else you gonna order in an Italian restaurant?), which led me to wonder a bit about the logic of their pricing. It’s pretty common knowledge that restaurants make a killing on their alcohol sales. But a half bottle of their wine was priced at $20, and full bottle of the same product $39. To my mind, the differential of one lowly dollar (even a US one) likely means they are going to sell a great many more half bottles than bottles. Pricing it, on the other hand, at say, $35 for a full bottle would likely draw many more buyers to the larger volume, at a correspondingly higher profit for the restaurant in overall wine sales.

But they sure must be doing something right because the place was full, and the waiting list for a table seemed constantly to hover around ten parties or thereabouts waiting in the foyer and bar.

Another cellphone digression: The advent of the “earpiece” phone, which means a user can now conduct a cellphone conversation while actually holding nothing whatsoever in his or her hand, has at last eliminated any apparent distinction in the eyes of an observer between a raving lunatic standing in the middle of a crowd preaching the virtues of eating dirt, and a busy executive on the go.

Next morning dawned as one of those shabby California days I’d heard so much about – a sky completely devoid of clouds and the temperature already resting on “comfortable”. (As a matter of note, if you’re holidaying in the West after having just arrived from the East, be prepared to start your days at some laughably early hours. On my very first morning in San Jose, when my body was telling me I’d already overslept because it was feeling exactly as it had the previous morning at 8:30 am – awake and in search of coffee – the clock was advising me it was in fact only 5:30.)

One of our first acts this day was to grab an airport limousine to go claim our rental car. The limousine had been unintended on our part, but that was the vehicle to which the concierge had steered us when we asked where to get a cab to the airport. The absence of a meter clued me in right away – that and the fact that the car was spotless and leapt forward when the driver accelerated after shifting it into “D”. Before we got very far, though, I asked the fare. The driver quoted a flat price that turned out to be only a couple dollars more than the previous day’s trip in the rolling advertisement for Mr Transmission. So we sat back and enjoyed the ride.

As we cruised along, the driver asked where we were from. Now I have found that often, in the US, it’s probably best for non-Americans to start with the broad-sweep answer to that question and work towards more narrowly defined geography only if it seems your questioner (a) knows and (b) cares where you’re from.

So… “Canada,” I replied.

Well, this sent him off on a personal reminiscence of his having had a great time, not too many years previous, on Vancouver Island – in Nanaimo, specifically.

So being my usual chatty self, I immediately asked him if he’d tried a Nanaimo bar while he was there.

“Oh you bet!” he responded with great enthusiasm. “And you know what really surprised me?” Wondering what surprises there were to be found in the city’s signature chocolate-topped coconut confection, I opened the conversational door further by answering, “No, I don’t.”

“It was the first bar I’ve ever been in where men and women sat side by side even though the strippers were all women. There’s nothing like that here and I just thought that was so cool.”

I honestly did not have the heart to intrude on his happy recollection by defining my question more specifically. I suspect the result would only have been to make him feel somewhat embarrassed. And I could tell even without looking at her that, beside me, my wife was making a heroic effort not to laugh.

Up next: the drive to Carmel, a pause at Pebble Beach, cruising the coastal highway and finding the elusive olallieberry.