Adventures in Travel: Part 3

A few final notes about my recent trip to New Jersey and the flight back. I know, I was planning to keep this short, but I sometimes find that I tend to be long-winded after taking in so much new and interesting details of the things that surround me.

First off, a few quick points about New Jersey. Here in Texas and I think in most other places, there seems to be this running joke about how bad The Garden State really is. I mean, the general assumption that everything is run down and the Mob is everywhere (which they may be) and that it is just a bad place to go. Well, let me just say, I found the place to be very beautiful. I can only assume that they pay a boatload of taxes there, or somehow New Jersey is siphoning off way more federal highway dollars than Texas is, because the roads, and the scenery along the roads were so totally superior to my beloved Texas, and especially, San Antonio.

We can’t do anything about the fact that everything here is dry and brown, but the general architecture of the roadways and the fact that they make an attempt to have things look attractive is a huge difference. They have some crazy idea of “no left turns against oncoming traffic” going on to where you have to get off the road on the right hand side and loop around to a light in order to cross the traffic. It sounds awkward, but I fully see and appreciate the safety aspect involved.

They also seem to plan restaurants and places where you have to enter the place from a rear street. This not only makes the appearance from the road nicer, but it also keeps traffic moving because you don’t have ten cars turning into ten different stores one after another. Instead, everybody exits the main thoroughfare and then enters the selected store from the slower off streets.

I did snap a picture of something of historic interest during my trip that, unless you see it in person, you can’t really appreciate the size. This is Golden Boy.

Golden Boy is located at the Global Network Operations Center for AT&T but it has a long and rich history that I find somewhat entertaining; when originally sculpted, Golden Boy (who is nekkid) was given very accurate proportions. So, standing at 24 feet tall, that makes his chin bigger, his wings bigger, his feet bigger… well, everything bigger. When the statue stood at the top of a tall building in New York City, this was not much of an issue, unless you were a pigeon looking for a place to perch, but when the statue was moved to the lobby of a new building, the former AT&T president (even before Ed Whitacre) made the John Ashcroft-like move and had the statue covered until artists could go in and perform a bit of surgery, to make Golden Boy not stand out as much. All I can say is, standing directly below the statue in question, I can only guess they could have done a lot more surgery! You can read more about it here.

So a colleague of mine brought one of those nifty Garmin GPS type systems with him and we used it to find our way around the area; if you have never used one of these puppies, I’m here to tell you, it works! You cannot get lost. I’m searching E-Bay to see what kind of a deal I could get without having to sell the dogs for lunchmeat.

I think Newark Liberty airport is pretty well laid out. But when we dropped off the rental car, there was an awkward smell. One co-worker said it smelled of potato chips. I voted for a combination of stale beer and human urine.

Anyway, from the rental car drop-off to the AirTrain that takes you to the terminals and up to the check-in area was all quite efficient, and there were helpful attendants along the way to make sure you knew where to go. Well done, I say.

When you have some time to kill before your flight boards, not because you got to the airport super early, but because the flight is delayed for about two hours, you take a few minutes in between pages of a book or magazine to observe various things. For instance, I finally realized the difference between coach class and Continental’s OnePass Elite Class: the Elite people get a little piece of carpet to walk on before they enter the plane.

Whoever the genius was who came up with this marketing strategy should get a bonus.

So, the flight home was somewhat uneventful, once we got started.

Once again, I had no fat people or screaming kids to contend with, but we did have a 7 foot tall giant, namely Patrick Ewing, the former Knicks star who was on his way to SAT for game one of the NBA Finals – a Spurs fan, I’m sure. Oh, and there was at least one guy who clearly had not bathed in days. Either that, or he was wearing some sort of Musk as though he might be a Hostess at Chili’s.

I should really brush up on my geography of the East as I hadn’t realized that Newark was nothing more than a suburb of NYC. No offense to the good people of Newark. So we got a great view of the Statue of Liberty just as the sun started to set, and the skyline of the city made me want to visit for more than just a brief layover at JFK on the way to Europe. Aren’t I the world traveler? Your tax dollars; my memories.

Anyway, the good news was, the plane was not full and I was seated in a row with a co-worker in the window seat, an empty seat in the middle and me on the aisle. Across the aisle from me was a Father from the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. We didn’t engage in confession or anything, but I felt confident that should we plunge from the sky, I could sort of grab his coat tails and hope for the best.

Though we obviously didn’t crash, there were several times during the 4-hour flight where, given the option, well, let’s just say that some poor infant toward the front of the aircraft was in desperate need of an Exorcism, yet the good Father seemed totally unfazed by the Devil Child and slept soundly through dinner and two beverage services.

Several times, I thought of Patrick Ewing (who by the way was very friendly to people who passed by him – looking up to smile and acknowledge the giddy little people on the flight) and wished that he would have used his massive size and appearance to hover over the little child and make a scary grimace or some ugly face so as to scare the little child into cardiac arrest, or at least leave him so scarred as to not have the ability to cry, for at least 4 hours. But, I suppose he has some of those fancy sound-canceling headphones and was never bothered by it.

How was your last trip out of Texas? Tell me about it.

Adventures in Travel: Part 1

I don’t really travel for work all that much anymore but I did make a brief two-day jaunt up to New Jersey this week. I won’t bore you with a lot of details but I did have a few observations that might be worth noting.

I tend to think of flying as an opportunity to relax, see something new, maybe read a book or magazine, and just get to the place I’m going without all the uncomfortable-ness of having to chat with people I don’t know. I mean, I figure if I have anything worth saying, you can read it here, and likewise, I won’t be offended if you happen to sit next to me on a plane and offer me a little note saying that you are an interesting person and I should therefore learn about everything you wanted to tell me in your Blog. I will be the first to admit, I am extremely anti-social and only come out of my shell purely in a rare and spontaneous manner, or if induced by multiple adult beverages.

So I was in luck this afternoon on my flight to Newark via Continental Flight 661 from SAT when it turns out that the guy in the middle seat immediately opened his book upon sitting down. We all know this (but some fell to accept it) as the international signal for; I don’t want to talk to you during this flight. I don’t have any interest in what you say and I don’t want to get to know you. I therefore acknowledged my row mates’ signal by presenting my bonfides if you will, a perfect stare downward to my lap and a quick opening of my own book, purchased just for this occasion.

In the art of travel, I was sitting pretty with no arm rest-bending, morbidly obese people (excluding myself) next to me, and no screaming kids. It seemed that everyone in my general vicinity had bathed and a brief scan of the cabin revealed only one possible terrorist looking person, and he was small fellow and a few seats in front of me, so I could keep an eye on him if need be. Yes, this was to be a good flight.

Until the guy in 10C took a seat.

I know that there are some of you who fly a lot who have a standard series of descriptions of what you do, what the purpose of your trip is and a handful of stories about yourself, suitably tailored for the type of person sitting next to you. This no doubt makes it easier to get the five to ten minutes worth of pleasantness over with while you anxiously await the first round of $5.00 drinks. Or am I being a bit cynical?

So when the guy in 10C seemingly unprovoked by the poor guy stuck in 10B started in on what seemed to be a dissertation for review by a panel of scholars about his thoughts on the war, I honestly expected him to pause for a word from his sponsor and perhaps even a test of the emergency broadcast system. I mean, this guy never let the other passenger get in so much as an “Uh Huh”. Oh, and this was all before the plane even pushed off from the gate!

Next up, he started in on how the US Army illegally participated in the Killing of Pablo Escobar, but it was cool because we saved ourselves from a lot of problems with Congress, and oh, don’t get him started on Hillary and Healthcare. Oops, I guess 10B must have sneezed because sure enough, he started in on Hillary and Healthcare. I actually broke my golden rule of never talking to my seatmates unless it involves the need to pee, but I turned to the guy next to me (who I actually know, so it isn’t that bad of a violation) and said, “Geeze, I feel like I’m listening to a radio talk show over here.” My colleague looked at me coolly, gave me condescending look as if to say I’m a rule violator, and then looked back down to his book.

Honestly, I tried to read my book but I found myself reading the same paragraph several times to fully understand what was written, because the guy behind me and to my left just kept yammering on as if he was the official knower of all information. The funny thing is, I even agreed with a lot of the crap he was prattling on about, but quite frankly, if I’m going to immerse myself in a bunch of political propaganda, I’ll tune into NPR or Hannity.

Finally, I think the guy in 10B had figured out that it wasn’t going to stop so he literally shut his eyes and placed his head on the headrest of the seat to his left while 10C was in mid-speech. Undeterred, he then strikes up a conversation with the guy directly behind me in 10D. This time, he had a willing participant. It was almost as if the guy in 10D had just been waiting and waiting to get in on the conversation. Great. And I had just spent $14.00 at Barnes & Noble for The Rum Diary and on a 4 hour flight I couldn’t get beyond page 68, but I now know more about buying a house in the Hill Country, the TAAKS test, Hillary, and the War than I ever wanted to. Have these people never heard of business cards? Seriously, I appreciate that people want to learn more about one another and I accept that people have spent many a lunch hour going to Toastmasters to learn to curtail the fear of speaking in public; but Sweet Sainted Sister of Paris Hilton, I don’t think shouting across the aisle in a plane is what they had in mind. Get the guy’s e-mail address and send him a Christmas Newsletter or start a freakin’ web page.

I’ll bore you with more about my trip later; meanwhile, if you have shared a flight with some interesting people, tell me about it.