Continental Airlines Flight 1045 sits at the gate in Houston, almost ready to board. Photo by Glenn.
Roni reads while Ben concentrates on his Gameboy as we wait in the lounge for our flight's boarding call. Photo by Glenn.
The lounge is fairly empty for a bit past 9 a.m. on a Friday morning. Is this typical? Houston's airport is much bigger than Sacramento's, but it seemed to us that it was a very efficient place as well. Photo by Glenn.
Packed in like sardines and ready for departure. We won't care as long as long as we've got our music, games and reading material. (OK, we might care, but at least the flight will be somewhat more bearable.) Photo by Glenn.
Just what on earth are these? Crop circles? We're somewhere over New Mexico or western Texas. A statistician's pie chart farm, that's it! Photo by Glenn.
The snow-frosted tops of the southern Rockies provide some visual relief from the monotony of the Southwest's arid landscape. Photo by Glenn.
Yahoo! It's the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe. That means about 15 more minutes until we land. That is some awesome blue water down there. The flight crew tells us it's almost time to put away the camera. Photo by Glenn.
Terra firma. Roni's still got her cowboy hat and Ben survived two weeks away from home. We even managed not to lose any luggage. All in all, not a bad trip. Photo by Glenn.
It may not be cherry red, and it is in desperate need of a bath, but at least it has four doors and room for three weary travelers. Best of all, it's ours! And it's still where we left it in Lot N42. Now we'll just pay the parking attendant the ransom fee and be on our way. Photo by Glenn.
Roni can hardly contain her enthusiasm as she shares the details of our adventure during a phone conversation with our friend and housesitter, Carolyn. Photo by Glenn.
Think traveling was hard on us, just ask our cats how they felt about it. Ariel thinks that two weeks without cuddle time was entirely too long. Photo by Glenn.
Nothing left to see on this trip. Next vacation is to Dreamland. (Soon as I shut off the camera.) Photo by Glenn.
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Homeward bound
Friday, October 1 (Day 15) — Modern air travel is truly an amazing thing. You'll have to excuse me for sounding like the modern equivalent of the 2000-year-old man, but to someone who flies about once a decade there have been so many changes to the way airlines and airports conduct business that it almost makes traveling by coach class pleasant. I did say almost. The truth of the matter is that coach is hopelessly uncomfortable on the current generation of 737s. The three hours we had to hang in the air today to make it home from Houston are probably about the most I could stand if I were to travel like this on a regular basis. For sure it is the most that Ben could handle, although I will say he did remarkably well this time. I think knowing what to expect after having flown two weeks ago helped him.
We awoke in the dark of our hotel room at 6 a.m. when the clock radio shouted at us. Actually, I was awake about a minute before the radio, having been unable to sleep soundly as is always the case when I know I have to be somewhere early in the morning. I am such a night owl these days that anything before noon seems early. Eight in the morning is ungodly. Six in the morning is extreme cruelty. Anyhow, somehow we all managed to be up and dressed and out the door by 6:45. We lugged our bags through the silent corridor, my eyes blurry with fatigue. My stomach was in a knot. Nerves. I was thankful we had organized our packing last night, because it probably saved us half an hour. We could have stopped in for the continental breakfast, but it was too early to think about food and we knew we weren't missing anything after yesterday's experience. With the Dodge's trunk stuffed full, I tried to focus my vision and pulled warily into the streaming traffic on Will Clayton Parkway.
The first order of business was returning the rental car. George Bush Intercontinental Airport of Houston boasts that it is the eighth largest airport in the nation. It says so on the LED signboard as you enter the facility. Fortunately, being one of the largest has not made the management lose sight of being one of the better organized. It was a simple matter to follow the signs to the rental car terminal, even in the pre-dawn darkness. Within minutes we were driving into the tail end of the receiving line at Thrifty. The moment of truth. There were a couple of cars ahead of ours. We gathered together our bags, I checked the mileage -- 2,600 for the entire vacation! -- and then waited while a guy with a handheld scanner made his way down the line to us and scanned the barcode on the Dodge's windshield. He jotted down odometer readings, checked the gas level and then printed us a receipt. That was it, we were done. We started for the elevator to the shuttle bus when I realized something was missing. The laptop! Yikes! I had left it in the trunk of the car and we had all apparently missed it because the rear of the bag is black just like the trunk and the front side, which is blue, was facing away from us. Roni flagged down the attendant and we retrieved the computer. I think I would have died had I left the computer behind, because at this point it contains the entire photo album of our vacation and the very travelogue you are reading. Or maybe you think I like writing 33,000 words for the heck of it.
We caught the shuttle bus almost instantly and were on our way to Terminal C where Continental Airlines flies out of. It was just after 7 a.m. and our flight wasn't scheduled to depart until 9:30. I had heard horror stories about airport delays and wanted to arrive early just in case we bogged down at check-in with the rental car or our baggage. We needn't have worried. Continental has an e-ticketing process where you can print your boarding pass off the Internet the day before your flight. We haven't had Internet access in two weeks and I was sure the lack of a boarding pass would mean we would have to wait in a long line at the ticket counter. Wrong again. We went through a short line at the baggage check where they take your bags and let you print your boarding pass right there. I had enough foresight last night to jot down the flight confirmation number from a Web page I had saved when I purchased our tickets in July, so I was able to plug in the number and we were set. We checked four bags this time. With souvenirs and bags full of dirty laundry, our original three bags couldn't hold everything. We had expected this, so we had packed an old black duffel bag inside one of the suitcases on the trip from Sacramento. Now each of those bags was stuffed -- one with souvenirs, one with books and jackets, one with our few remaining clean clothes, and the last one, our largest, with about 10 plastic bags of dirty laundry. The fourth bag was probably close to or over the 50-pound weight limit, but there was never a complaint from the baggage clerk.
Next came the security screening, during which I got to perform the airport equivalent of the Texas two-step. We thought we had this part down after Sacramento. You take your carry-on bags and set them on the conveyor belt, then you pull your laptops and cameras from their cases and put them in little gray dishwater tubs. Last, you step through the metal detector and hope it doesn't beep at you. Oops! There is another detail they slip in on you at Houston that they didn't require in Sacramento, and that is the removal of your shoes. Roni and Ben heard the screener tell them to remove their shoes, but somehow I blanked and didn't realize what was going on. Maybe I thought it was something about sandals, and that tennis shoe wearers were exempt. Whatever it was, I stepped through the detector with my shoes on and was promptly quarantined by the screener. I offered to step back through the detector, but apparently once through it's like the point of no return. I had to wait for a special "male screener" to come over and take me to another area where I was administered a pat-down and subjected to having the wand passed over my entire person. I had to empty my pockets, raise my feet so they could be scanned one at a time, then finally the screener took swabs of my shoelaces and ran them through a machine that presumably tests for explosive residue. I passed. I guess I should be glad that the airport security people are doing their job, but boy what a pain in the butt. (Only tonight as we were unpacking our suitcases did we discover that the largest of our four bags had been searched by the Transportation Security Administration after we had checked it. Apparently this is routine, but they had to cut off our lock to look inside. There was a note inserted into the bag explaining what had happened and apologizing for cutting the lock. I don't know if they saw something suspicious about the bag or if its weight made them suspicious. Perhaps they thought it contained a bomb. A stink bomb maybe, with all those plastic bags of dirty laundry. Anyhow, the note includes a website address with packing tips that might help us next time avoid a similar inconvenient search. Sheesh. They're touchy in Houston.)
The shoe ordeal proved to be the only snag in catching our flight. We stepped onto the people mover and let it take us and our bags through the terminal. I looked through the picture windows across the hall and saw a brilliant orange sun rising near the airport's control tower. We were so far ahead of schedule that we had time to grab breakfast from one of the overpriced restaurants on the concourse. A bagel, muffin, apple fritter and three drinks set us back almost $13. After cramming down our food we visited the gift shop I had seen on our arrival in Houston two weeks ago. I was determined to get my Houston postcards. I found them, but they were $1.49 each. And to think that I balked when I found postcards for 79 cents at the state fair. I passed on these, and am thankful that I picked up the two that I found in Galveston yesterday. I have never been on a trip where finding postcards of major cities was so tough. As a result, my postcard collection from this trip is perhaps about half of what it might have been. My enjoyment of our travels is no less.
We arrived at Gate C-43 with over an hour to spare. I watched as the ground crews serviced the plane. Watched the food service truck remove leftovers from the previous flight and bring in lockers full of breakfast foods. Watched as they fueled the plane and loaded our luggage. Shortly after 9 a.m. they began boarding Flight 1045 to Sacramento. We had the same seats as the first flight -- 24D, E and F. I grabbed the window seat this time, with Ben in the middle and Roni on the aisle. I had planned to swap with her somewhere mid-flight, but it never worked out that way. This time we made sure to put only one bag in the lockers above the seats and hang on to the others to avoid having to track down several carry-ons at the end of the flight. I stowed the laptop and kept my MP3 player and camera with our smallest red bag now filled with souvenir items. Ben kept his backpack and Gameboy, while Roni had her pink handbag and her cowboy hat that she had to wear on the plane because it wouldn't fit anywhere else. I guess we weren't the only ones with time to kill before the flight, because the captain told everyone that we would be departing a few minutes early. We rolled out of the gate a little before 9:30 and queued up with several other planes for our trip down the runway. Houston is so much larger than Sacramento and yet getting through the airport was quick and efficient.
As we lifted off, the plane banked left and for a moment I could see the outskirts of Houston through the haze. I was thinking as the plane left the runway that this was the last time we would set foot on Texas soil. Our vacation was really over. The butterflies in my stomach had turned to alligators. I was hungry, or perhaps just queasy. I don't get motion sickness, but I sure felt like I had it for about the first hour of the flight. The seats in coach class made me feel claustrophobic. It helped a bit when the flight attendants served a breakfast of frosted flakes, milk, an apple spice muffin and a banana. I washed it down with orange juice and felt better for a while.Ben was very nervous about the flight but seemed to calm down once we were in the air and he could play with his new Gameboy cartridge Roni gave him before we left Houston. Our in-flight movie was a dopey Wayans Brothers comedy called "White Chicks." I was half asleep but couldn't sleep. Part of me just wanted to close my eyes and nap until the end of the flight, but the adventurer in me wanted to take full advantage of my window seat and watch the earth from 35,000 feet up. The window watching won out. We flew over Austin, which looked more serene than it had when we were stuck in traffic there the other day. We flew north of San Antonio and headed northwest over New Mexico and into Utah. Not the interesting views of the Canyonlands we saw two weeks ago. This area was truly desolate, all the way till we hit central Nevada. Then as we descended over Lake Tahoe I saw Carson City and Reno, Truckee, Auburn and parts of the Sierra Nevada. Suddenly the farms were rushing up to meet us, and we touched down on the runway at Sacramento around 11:25 a.m. PDT. An uneventful flight. Hooray.
We waited with the rest of the passengers for the baggage to come off the plane, then caught the shuttle back to the economy parking lot where my filthy Toyota Corolla still sat waiting for us. I didn't realize how badly it needs a wash until I saw it sitting there in lot 42N with dirt streaks on every surface. After driving the Dodge Stratus for two weeks and never seeing it truly dirty, seeing my car was a tremendous shock. It had obviously rained once or twice in our absence. But there was nothing like being behind the wheel of my own car again. It handles so much easier than the Dodge did. I am convinced I never would have hit that curb in San Antonio in my car. We paid the lot attendant $100 for the 15 days and were on our way back to Normalville.
All I could think as I cruised down I-5 south was how comfortable and familiar everything felt -- the freeway, my car, the trees and farms we passed, the clean, 72-degree air. Sacramento isn't home but it could have been compared to all the places we had visited. As we drove along Highway 160 on the Sacramento River toward Antioch, I compared mental notes on the Mississippi River to waht I was looking at now and there was no contest. Our Delta is infinitely more beautiful than any of the Mississippi we saw. I'm sure the natives of those Southern states would disagree, but here our levees come right up to the water, and you can pull off to the shoulder and actually walk down to the river's edge. There are no refineries or rock quarries. The water is clean. People play in it -- there were dozens of boats out this afternoon as folks got an early start to the weekend. In this regard, there truly is no place like home.
As we drove over the Antioch Bridge and into Oakley, the usual fears began to creep into my mind. Would the house still be there? Would all our belongings still be inside? Would the cats be OK? After pulling into the driveway it appeared that the only casualty of our vacation was some of our front yard rose bushes, which have been turned into gopher food. The cats were fine, if not a little startled to see us again. Everything was as we had left it, for better or worse. Roni called our friend Carolyn who had been house-sitting for us, to let her know we were back. I listened to her relay with great enthusiasm the details of our vacation, and I had to smile because at that moment I realized how successful our trip had been. We managed to turn this fantasy vacation idea we had three months ago into a reality, with only a few minor hitches along the way. Yes, it was expensive, but what price can you put on relaxation? We had no phones ringing off the hook, no Internet, no worries about work or office politics. It was great while it lasted. We are already talking about the next vacation, now that we are seasoned travelers. Will it be by plane? I don't know. Nor do I know where to. But wherever it is, we'll be hard pressed to duplicate the adventure we had on the road in the Deep South.
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