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So Far
By Milt Abel | December 7, 2010
| December 7, 2010So Far
On a flight out to join the Coral Princes in ft Lauderdale a couple weeks back a family of five boarded the plane ahead of me, using the the courtesy airlines extend to parents with small children to board early. They had three girls, maybe ages seven, five, and two. Each was dressed in the same outfit; a plaid winter-coat, white gloves, and a beret. The matching wardrobe told me the family had some affluence, our kids, whenever we do travel, look like they rummaged through a pile of pull-overs dropped at the edge of a playground basketball game. If my wife and I demanded they appear in the same clothing for a trip, we’d never get out of the house.
When I entered the plane and began walking down the aisle I could hear the youngest girl crying over the seating assignments parsed out by her father. I saw him pointing to the aisle seat, while the oldest sister sat upright and pleased near the window. The youngest girl reminded me of my youngest, who was mature beyond her (two)years, well spoked and self-possessed. As I passed, through her crying sobs she took one last try to get that window seat, she implored to her father; “This is the worst thing that has happened in my life so far!” For someone so young to do that kind of inventory, and use it in an attempt to manipulate, made me softly laugh out loud. Probably because It may indeed have been the worse thing so far. Lucky you. There’s more to come.
I had some troubles of my own traveling through Costa Rica on my return from the Coral Princess on December 1. On the Atlantic side of the country cruise ships usually stop at Puerto Limon and the closest serious airport is in the capital, San Jose, about 110 miles away. With the single-lane sections of road, lumbering freight trucks, and mountainous last quarter, the drive usually takes a touch over three hours. This Wednesday it took us six.
Dockside, I was shepherded into a van with a traveling guest of an entertainer on board, a repositioning crew member, and a contractor who specialized in electric motors -big motors, the ones that drive the entire ship motors. I should have been more alarmed when he commented in the first few minutes of our drive, “I don’t like the sound of that engine.” If our mission that day was to talk in front of an audience and I said something questioning about the mike stand we were using, I bet he would have listened. But since I had halfway torn apart car engines in high school, thirty-five years ago, I knew about engines too. A few of those cars I worked on actually ran afterwards too. (but not all)
An hour into our drive we were struggling to maintain thirty miles an hour, and we had covered a distance that normally should have taken us only thirty minutes. The engine got worse as we proceeded, billowing smoke and slowing further. Those lumbering freight trucks were speeding past us. I looked at a local on a bicycle as we passed and wondered how long before I saw him again and if he’d let me ride on his handlebar.
Did I mention the torrential rain? The swelling roadside creeks that close the road and start mudslides? Did I mention out driver didn’t speak English? That his cell phone worked sporadically as we inched from one weak cell reception area to the next?
It was an ordeal. I had to demand that we call and replace the van, for some reason the driver wouldn’t do it on his own. Maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t be rehired, but I didn’t want to spend the day in a van that was floating down a brand new Costa Rican river.
As bad as it was, there were a couple pluses. When the engine did finally completely die we were in a location that had cell reception so we could call and get saved. There was also a roadside restaurant that severed nachos and soft drinks and had a bathroom. I wasn’t scheduled to fly out that day, but the next, so I wasn’t completely freaked out by the delays.
Standing under the awning of the open air restaurant, with streams of water pouring off the roof in several places, I sipped my diet Pepsi and watched the bike rider pedal past, soaked to the bone. It was not my worse day of travel, so far.
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