Air Travel Sucks!
In the hour or so we allow ourselves every evening to relax and play with the laptop, I spend most of my time diddling with Lightroom or planning the next phase of the trip. It turns out that Anthony is an expert travel logistician, adept at surfing Trip Advisor and Sidestep for the best hotel deals, figuring out which rail pass to buy, deciding which sights are worth seeing. Still, I try to do my part, and all of the planning leaves little time for blogging.
Because I’ve been so lazy, I’m going to have to cover all of Iceland – and all of Norway so far – in a few quick blog entries. In the process, I’m sure I will ruthlessly murder more than one detail.
Our journey began as always, with a trip to LAX in a rented econo-box. Virgin America had us checked into our flight and past security with hours to spare, giving us time to duck into an airport bar for a pre-flight drink or thre. Thus did I board the flight to New York well lubricated with whiskey, and somewhat less daunted by the 28 hours of air travel that lay before us.
Seated next to me was a teenager dressed in a severe black hand-tailored suit, wearing a small travel yarmulke and fiddling with a hat-carrier in his lap. His attire allowed even someone as dense as I to conclude that this kid was an orthodox Jew – I was somewhat surprised to see him traveling on a Saturday, until I recalled that according to Yahweh’s calendar, the day begins at sundown. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not, in fact, arrive at the airport three hours before departure as recommended by the airline…
Ari was his name, and he was returning from a trip to LA with his father, who was seated in first class. His father is obviously a genius, having devised a way to obtain free child care from his fellow passengers. Ari chatted at me about music for awhile, but I quickly began to bore him. Male teenagers quickly grow tired of anything that isn’t equipped with boobies or blinking lights.
Ari whipped out his Nokia Sidekick and began texting random friends and acquaintances, but after a minute, even that grew tiresome and he turned to me once again for entertainment. By way of self-defense, I showed him how to open a chat channel to his father’s seat and pointed out Virgin’s generous selection of video games, which kept him busy for the better part of an hour. For the rest of the flight, I feigned sleep in order to avoid an onslaught of random musical trivia and discussions of which pop starlets he’d be willing to sleep with. (In summary: all of them.)
Fast-forward five hours to our arrival in New York. It’s early Sunday morning, and the temperature outside the airport is hovering around freezing. We have a twelve-hour layover, we’re burdened with luggage, and I am thoroughly punch-drunk from sleep dep. Our original plan was to put our luggage into storage and spend a day on the town, but all of the luggage storage businesses have inexplicably closed forever. Overhead signs point the way toward “Information,” which turns out to be a TV monitor with flight departure and arrival times. I am not amused.
We wander the abandoned terminal for an hour, and eventually manage to find a wi-fi signal and pull up a list of hotels near the airport. Scrapping our original plan, Anthony and I check ourselves into a business hotel near the airport and catch a few hours of shut-eye. The remainder of our trip passes uneventfully; one plane flight and eight sleepless hours later, at 8am local time, a minibus dumps us onto the frozen streets of downtown Reykjavik.