There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2004-08-16

Helloo, Pantsberg. Subtitle: Why I hate to travel

It took a full day to get from Point A to Point B, and although I did little beyond sitting on my hiney, it made me very, very tired. We almost missed a connection in Chicago because one of the weenies I was traveling with had to go get some kind of frozen mochaccino girl drink and the line was long. I had to fly in a plane so small that it had one seat per row on one side of the plane, and two seats on the other. I have flown in smaller planes, though. Once, just after a rough landing in such a plane in Pierre, South Dakota, (and by rough, I mean that if you looked out of the window on the left side of the plane you saw nothing but sky, and if you looked out the window on the right side of the plane you saw nothing but dirt) the 12-year-old pilot burst through the cockpit �door� (curtain) and yelled, �Whooo! That was sure scary, wasn�t it?�

That plane just had the one row of seats all the way down (that would be 12 seats) and we had to rearrange the two fat guys so the plane was balanced better. The funny thing is that they gave us seat assignments like 2A and 4A and 5A.

So, after I spent all day getting to Pantsberg and left my new book on the plane, the guys who wanted me to go there because I know stuff they don�t know (i.e., grammar), took us out to dinner. For sandwiches. At a cafeteria. That serves Pepsi, not Coke. Business travel is very glamorous. Then we went back to the hotel where I headed to the bar so I could drink enough to fall asleep.

This morning I noticed that the water there is different, but I don�t know exactly how. As I showered, my whole body got squeaky, so when I soaped up, I could hear �eee-eee-eee,� which also happened with the shampoo. I have weird hair to start with and I don�t need weird water to make it worse.

Once when I was in Mississippi on another glamorous business trip (on which I forgot my medication and cried every day), we stayed at a Holiday Inn that had signs in the bathroom explaining that the water in the toilet was brown not due to any plumbing malfunction, but due instead to the fact that the water was from the Mississippi River and that was as clean as they could get it. They had written a little poem to that effect, and to this day I regret not stealing that placard from the bathroom. It was the least they owed me since the cable that should have supplied cable TV to my room was ripped out of the wall. That was almost made up for by the last stop on the death march across Mississippi: The Beau Rivage, which is some sort of casino/mall/hotel/brothel. Somehow, they managed to make the water in the toilet clear.

0 comments so far

birth & death