Do you know what my favorite thing about the holidays is? Winter break. Yeah, sure Christmas is nice, but it really lost most of its luster when a friend told me last week that Santa doesn’t exist. Besides, the whole winter wonderland vibe is overrated, which is why I was excited about winter break. I would be leaving cold Colorado, where I could count the temperature in degrees on my fingers (which isn’t saying much, especially since three of my fingers fell of due to frostbite and I can only count to four anyway) Hawaii, on the other hand, would be 75 degrees and sunny even in an ice age. So needless to say, after I woke up and walked out of my last final I was pretty happy about going back. There was just one thing I was dreading: flying. Hawaii, as you would see on a map, is in a box in the middle of the Pacific Ocean along with Alaska. So to get to Hawaii from Colorado, I would have to take an eight hour plane flight. Now, let me clarify why I do not like flying. By all reasoning I should love flying. I mean, I love sitting for hours and not moving and drifting in and out of consciousness, and being from Hawaii I fly a lot. Normally, I just fall asleep for the whole flight. The reason I don’t like flying is people. Something about traveling turns regular people into crazed lunatics waving their luggage tags at you.
When I fly back to Hawaii, most of the people I fly back with are families or couples going on vacation. They’ve probably planned this trip for months, a chance to bond and have the time of their lives in paradise. Needless to say, by the time they get to the gate they are foaming at the mouth and on the verge of killing each other (and nobody would stop them because they are in arguments of their own). It starts out with Dad forgetting where he put the boarding pass, then Bobby realizes he didn’t pack Molly’s slippers and then Mom wants to shop at the duty free shop but we don’t have time because our flight is here already and then we rush to the gate but now it’s delayed and Jimmy stop bothering Amanda I don’t care if she started it and now our gate is changed and you Mr. Airplane person what do you mean you lost our luggage and no, we don’t have a window seat EVERY BODY SHUT UP! OKAY! WE ARE HERE TO HAVE FUN GODDAMIT!
Then there is security. When I came back I only had a backpack and I was wearing rubber slippers, so the screening was easy for me. But the security procedures can get complicated. At one point, they held my ID under one of those blue lights they use in CSI. I don’t know what they expected to find. Semen? (Not that there was any on mine). It doesn’t get any better when you get on the plane. With airlines charging for baggage, people have resorted to carrying on as much baggage as they can. It is no longer unusual for a person to walk onto a plane carrying, for instance, recreational vehicles. And of course, they stand in the isle for days holding up the line trying to fit their carry on into the overhead compartments even though everyone else on the plane can tell it will not fit (there is a “she said” joke somewhere in there).
Once everyone is finally seated (allow two to three days), the plane finally takes off. Unfortunately, airlines have started charging for things that used to be free, such as food, headphones for your in-flight crappy movie (mine was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2), pillows, drinks, air, life vests, etc. But it could be worse. You could be the DeMaltha High School basketball team. The team, on their way from Maryland to a tournament on Oahu consisted of about twenty players and coaches on my flight from Denver. Not one of them was shorter than six feet, and they had been traveling for the better part of two days. If you want to see what a person looks like when their body is still living but their soul has died, you should have seen these poor kids. They looked like they just wanted to die. One of the taller ones, a lanky kid around 6’5’’, walked around the isles almost the entire flight (now you know why it’s so hard to play the University of Hawaii at home).
TANGENT ALERT: Over Thanksgiving break I saw the movie “Soul Plane,” which is quite possibly the worst movie ever made. What made it worse is that we watched it on YouTube in ten segments. Which means that ten separate times, we made a conscious decision to keep watching it. One day when I die and stand before the gates of heaven, I will have to answer for this. Anyway, the plot (if you could call it that) is that this guy tries to make his own airline that runs the way he wants. The plane had bars, clubs, sofas, and hot flight attendants. If I ever become rich, I plan to have a plane built for me exactly as in the movie. In fact, I will run for President solely for the purpose of pimping Air Force One.
But I digress. Our plane finally landed in Honolulu. Eight hours of hell, but we’re here in paradise. It was all worth it, right? Do you know what the first thing we smelled as we walked through the moving tunnel? Mildew. Apparently it had rained really hard that day so the carpet got wet and moldy, and it smelled pretty dank (think that’s bad? Kona airport doesn’t even have those tunnel things; you just walk down the stairs onto the tarmac). Well at least the weather is nice… oh wait, did I mention rain? So needless to say, I saw some disappointed tourists.
But not me. After another thirty-minute connecting flight, I was home! And do you know what the first thing I did after nine hours of sitting in a chair and sleeping? I went straight to bed.
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