Someone told me that the word travel comes from the French word travail, which, according to dictionary.com, means “pain, anguish or suffering resulting from mental or physical hardship.”
Well, that about sums up my trip yesterday. I woke up in Atlanta, drove to Dahlonega, Georgia, watched the Falcons lose a football game with my dad, went to an early dinner, drove to the Atlanta airport, wandered through the airport for a while trying to find a bar that had room for me, failed, then caught a 10PM flight to San Francisco, got in at 12:30, and was home in bed by 1:30 in the morning, Pacific time.
I was completely exhausted, and thoroughly irritable from lack of nourishment, when I got to San Francisco. But I enjoyed it. I guess I just like moving from place to place, and the lack of sleep and the jet-lag, and the strange cultures encountered –and the sub-par yet expensive food, all of it deep fried, of course — and the fat guy who, for reasons unknown, tried to go to the bathroom, not by excusing himself to his seat-mate on his aisle, but by trying to squeeze to the right of my window seat, upsetting my almost sacred tiny plastic cup of water in the process.
I’d never seen anyone do that before, by the way. Well, any adult anyway. Who does that? I’m sitting there, reading my book when a giant red be-sweatpanted leg exploded into my field of vision. “This guy won’t mind. I’ll just hurtle over him unannounced…” I sort of admire him, for attempting such an illogical and impossible feat. Sort of.
Even red sweatpants guy, in his sublimely inexplicable thinking, and obvious rudeness, was enjoyable. You just don’t see such sights sitting on the couch after all.
Travel, as we all know, magazine ads notwithstanding, isn’t glamorous. (The golden age of travel probably wasn’t either. They might have been better dressed but they also passed smallpox around like a Grateful Dead bootleg.) The act of going from place to place is a chore. And, with people expanding and legroom shrinking, it’s not getting any easier. But, like some sadist, I put up with the frequent indignities and the rotten smells and the bureaucracy and aggressive incompetence as a small price to pay for getting somewhere I want to go.
