Pre Hawaii

Buckle your seat belts, locate your life vest and air mask (life vest?) join me for a time travel back in time to last Tuesday, 1/19/10.

Ah the airport. I guess it feels funny and different when you are waiting at a new gate. I mean, I acknowledge that every time you fly it's new gate... although the gate itself is rather generic, what's new and weird and funny and different ("ands" completely conscious) are the gate's contents. Today, while we nurse our fast food bellies at gate C4 to Maui "C4 to Maui Charlie four to Maui'' the stewardess says over the loud speaker, this gate is breaking free and molding to a different type of generic content.

This gate feels particularly different then the rest because it's Tuesday at ten in the morning. I find it strange that eighty percent of the people are fifty plus years older then us, and ninety percent of the people at gate "Charlie Four" have straw hats. I want to say right now that I'm not ageist nor a straw hat-ist (Hatist? Strawist?), I'm merely observing what people do on a Tuesday morning at gate Charlie Four located at the PDX airport.

The Stewardess makes an announcement that our flight has been randomly chosen to have airport personnel "randomly" search the bags of the random contents of gate C4. The stewardess makes it sound like winning a big fat check (the size of a small child or big dog), she really puts emphasis on "random" and "person" and "check." I imagine it just like Publisher's Clearing House , accept no check , no balloons, and no live camera crew. Since there is no check, no balloons, and no camera crew I try to act as "normal" (whatever that means) as possible to avoid "random" bag search.

I talk loudly to Alex, discussing normal things like "the weather" or "I just can't wait to hike to the top of the Volcano.. ha ha ha" I say with a bit of a forced happy inflection (by a bit a mean a lot). When I feel like no one is looking, I whisper sweet nothings to Alex such as "wanna make bets who gets searched?" Someone glances in our directions and I'm all "dolphins" and "sea turtles," they look away and I'm "even though we're probably targets for the random search, my bet is on that couple...blue hair piercings, consider their bags searched" (oh and by the way, I'm not a pierce-ist or a blue hair-ist, hair-ist? Just putting my bets where they could count).

We made the cut search free... maybe it was our lack of straw hats? Perhaps my over enthusiasm to travel? I guess we'll never know. So while we hover over the clouds, on our way to Maui, Alex is asleep next to me. I sit and watch people come and go down the aisle and think to myself, "it's a good damn thing that red head man brought his straw hat, I'll bet he burns like paper!"

And the trip unfolds from there folks. Stay tuned as I time travel to the tops of volcanoes and to the depth of the ocean.