Shouting into the Wind Saying my piece in a windy world.

(This is part one, and honestly, it contains absolutely no info about the Film Festival.  In fact, it only covers my trip to Austin.  So, if you really don’t care about my travel complaints, feel free to wait for Part Two).

Day 0:

My flight was scheduled obscenely early – 6:50 AM, which, if I was being dropped off at the airport wouldn’t be horrible, but due to a scheduling SNAFU, I had to order up an airport shuttle to pick me up at 4:10 AM.  Now, the shuttle service, being just a little too service oriented, felt the need to call me at 3 AM to inform me that my van would be 10 minutes early.  As in, it will be there at 4.  And they called me at 3 to tell me this.  After I had finally fallen asleep around 2:30.  Needless to say, when the phone rang and I jumped to answer, I didn’t go back to bed.  After all, I only had an hour before the van would arrive (and not an hour and ten minutes, as I had previously believed).  So, I got out of bed, showered and headed down to the street at 3:50, where I found my shuttle was, in fact, already there waiting.

Clearly these shuttle people know what they’re doing.

So I’m also first on this particular shuttle, driven by a grizzled Armenian man whos wife died last year and he has three daughters in various stages of adulthood/schooling, the youngest being interested in the film business by attending college in Santa Monica.  Mercifully before he could tell me about the rest of his extended family, we picked up the next airport traveler – a woman, who was saying a tearful goodbye to her late teens/early twenties daughter at 4:20 AM.  Clearly emotional, the woman sniffled, and our driver kindly offered her his box of tissues, which had one last tissue in it.  “Why are you crying?” He asked, as if he’d never picked up a crying woman headed to the airport before.

“I just miss her.  She’s my baby.”  The woman dabbed her eyes.

“Be patient, ma’am.” Our driver replied, and he continued on to the next passenger.  The chatter ceased and an eerie silence fell over the vehicle, with only smooth jazz on the radio to console us.

The third passenger appeared to be a business man, practiced in the art of travel.  He boarded, each of us sitting in a different row in the van and we were finally off to the airport.  Of course, me having been picked up first, I was last to be dropped off (not anyone’s fault, just the luck of terminal locations for all of us).  5:10 AM.  One of the longest fast rides to the airport I’ve ever taken.

Security was particularly picky this morning.  As I approached the escalator to the security line, a TSA agent stopped me.  I handed her my ticket and ID, as if on auto-pilot.

“You need to put your bag in there.”  She pointed at the sign next to the escalator…you know, the one that says ‘if your bag is bigger than this, you must check it.”  I always wondered if anyone actually tried to fit their carry on bag in that metal frame, just out of curiosity.  On this morning, the TSA agents had decided we all needed to do just that, and while I had to only move my Ziploc bag of liquids to my backpack in order to comply, the girl next to me in line wasn’t so lucky.  Try as she might, her bag would not go down into the frame.  The TSA lady just stared at her, shaking her head.  The girl sighed, tried removing a few things, shuffling around some others.  She put the bag back in the frame.  It got about halfway down before it stuck, and as she tried to push it the rest of the way down, an avalanche of small Styrofoam beads poured out of the front pocket.  Of course, I was already pulling my bag out and heading up the escalator, but I assume the girl hadn’t bothered to take her travel pillow out of her bag, and it looked like it wasn’t going to be much use to her now, or at least not nearly as helpful, what with half of its innards spilled all over the floor.

The security line didn’t move.  I’ve never seen this kind of logjam at 5:30 AM, but I can’t say it’s completely out of the ordinary.  I don’t often travel at that hour, but it seemed to me that we should all be flying through security.  Instead, as I waited, I noted they split our line in half and led some of us toward another line.  I shrugged at someone unlucky enough to have been in the front half of the immobile line, a vain gesture of apology that I had won whatever weird lottery we were entered in together this morning.

Finally both lines moved, and just as I have so many times before, I felt like I was in the starter block, ready for the gun to go off and start the race.  Remove the sweater. Take off the shoes. Hurry now, people behind you…take the laptop out of the bag, grab two bins, one for the shoes and sweater and –oh crap, I almost forgot the liquids! – and the other for the laptop.  Try to keep moving, juggling the two bins, my backpack, my carry on, my ticket and my ID.  As I watched the last of my items disappear into the x-ray machine, I mentally hit the stopwatch which timed my movements.  Not bad, bobbled near the end and lost a couple tenths of a second.  Not a world record, but not the slowest in the pack either.  At least I know well enough not to wear jewelry to the airport, so I breeze right on through, no sign of metal on my body.

Then the slightly slower jog to put everything back together.   I always seem to have one shoe that won’t go on my foot completely and I end up limping away from the conveyor as if I’m Quasimodo (which is a fairly apt description when I have my backpack slung over one shoulder, my sweater folded over one arm and I’m dragging my carry on behind me).  Once more I’ve completed the gauntlet, and am headed for the promised land – the alley of commerce and the gates.

The line for Starbucks weaved around a couple of pillars, so desperate were people for high end branded coffee.  I opted instead for the low-rent line at Burger King, so intent on a little grease to go with my large bottle of water.  Somehow I again won the airport lottery with an accidental free upsize on my hash rounds.  I don’t complain, obviously.

Now I make my way to the gate, and it’s not yet 6 AM, so I’ve got at least 40 minutes before my plane boards.  I scarf down my breakfast, gulp the orange juice (from concentrate) and rearrange the contents of my backpack as I search for the Dramamine.  Now, I don’t experience motion sickness on planes.  That is because I always take Dramamine, not because I think that I’ll get sick if I don’t take it – I have no idea if I’d get sick if I didn’t take it.  At this point, I take it more as ritual and habit than to actually prevent any kind of illness.  It does also help knock me out, and considering the half hour or so of sleep I got so far this morning, I sense I’m gonna need that.

After a frantic search, I finally uncover the Dramamine and relax.  Looking around, I can tell this plane is nowhere near full, which is a big win.  I had changed my seat at check in to put me in a row further back on the plane, but by myself.  Now it looked like that switch would pay off, as I took my seat and realized that once we were in the air, I’d be able to lay across all three seats.

Of course, about an hour into the flight, I was awakened (even with earplugs in) by the familiar ‘DING’ of the seatbelt sign.  We’d hit turbulence that was going to stay with us for the remainder of the flight.  Lovely.  I sat up in my seat, refastened my seatbelt and tried to get comfortable leaning against the bulkhead which was, of course, a total failure.

I know I didn’t sleep like that, but you do go into a sort of trance when in that position, because really, what else are you going to do?  I stared at clouds which got progressively brighter as the daylight grew in front of us.  Still, lots of clouds, lots of bumpiness.  Not the best flight ever.

Landing in Austin, I feel that familiar sensation of relief of having actually made it to my destination, and knowing a bathroom is now within a short distance.  As I stepped off the jetway and into the airport, I smiled.  I only see this place once (well, technically twice) a year, but it looked the same.  My internal GPS led me to the desk downstairs where I paid for a roundtrip shuttle ticket to my hotel, and waited.

Another long ride, with lots of stops, and though I wasn’t dead last, I was near the end of the drop offs again.  Local time: 12:30 PM.  I was here at least 4 hours before any of my friends would arrive.

This is the first year I didn’t book the hotel room.  I’ve never considered myself much of a control freak, but when I set foot into the hotel, I suddenly wished the room was in my name.  If I had been able to check in, I could’ve taken a nap as I waited for Brett and Julie to arrive.  Instead, I stored my bag and walked across the street to the Driskill.

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