Back in the lower 48

I am back home and I survived my 3500-mile road trip adventure. In fact this is my second day home, but I’ve been so exhausted that I haven’t been able to muster up the energy to write anything substantial. I didn’t even know how tired I was until I was about 90 miles away from home — that was when my brain gave my body permission to feel the fatigue of driving that distance in just over six days. And since (even today), I am drowsy and more interested in napping than doing nearly anything else.

It was an adventure, but if I were to do it again, I’d probably make far more stops to enjoy the scenery (at least in Alaska, Yukon and British Columbia). But we were trying to cover as many miles as possible so that we could get to our respective homes and settle back into life without have a household on a trailer for someone to muck about with in tow.

Even the flight out was a bit of an unintentional adventure. The taxi before taking flight was lengthy, putting us well past the time the airline lands in Anchorage; usually within +/- 10 minutes of the scheduled landing. But the taxi was overlong and, before we could get permission to use the runway, nearly 40 minutes had passed. I had a connecting hopper flight on a 10-seater scheduled rather close to the landing ETA due to a rush of summer salmon fishers booking most of the flights before I got around to booking my own, so I had grabbed the option that didn’t have me sitting in the airport for four hours between flights. It was almost not enough with the added delay in Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

We landed 20 minutes before that flight and were on the way to the gate when the next flight asked if I still planned to fly that day. “Can you get here in ten minutes?” they asked. “I surely hope so,” was my response. I begged and plead with my fellow flight guests to let me cut ahead of them when we docked at the gate and jogged… no, ran… to the gate my next flight was leaving from.

For those of you old enough to recall when OJ Simpson was still a sports hero instead of a wife-killer and those old commercials where we was running through a busy airport “juking to the left, juking to the right” to avoid the more casual patrons, it was something like that. Except… imagine a clumsy walrus attempting to make such moves. And I didn’t have the benefit of a moving walkway to helps speed me along, although I tried to use the escalators in the same manner. *thump thump thump* cried my poor carryon’s wheels and I basically did a controlled fall down to the first-floor gate area after the luggage.

I checked in, asking is I was too late, panting and blowing like a horse that was more nag than racehorse (but used in the manner of a racehorse).

Just in time, apparently. The young woman who had called me fifteen minutes earlier cheered when she overhead my name. “Yay! You did it!”

Wheezing and collapsed in the seat waiting for boarding, I wasn’t sure if I honestly had “made it”. In fact, I wondered if I hadn’t left part of me behind in my mad scramble to get there.

The thing is, while that part of the trip was very stressful… I also met some of the nicest folks while on my flights. From the older couple next to me on the nearly six-hour flight and, in fact, most of the other fliers around me to the security guard who helped point me down the escalators when I asked for how to get to the next gate while running to the young gal who did an actual cheer on my behalf and made me grin from ear to ear. I won’t sugarcoat the matter — almost every flight I’ve taken in the past ten years seems to have had at least one unruly flier making it hard for everyone else to just make it to their destination without plotting quiet murder of said person as they sat in their seats. On this flight, everyone was generally well behaved and polite. Even letting me cut ahead when deplaning without a complaint. A couple of folks even wished me good luck as I passed them.

It almost reminded me of back when that was the norm instead of the other type of experience. My estimation of humans went upwards a smidge as a result.

Making my athletics all worth while, even if I looked like a dying beached whale when I sat for the two minutes before I boarded the hopper.