On Holiday

We’re off on a 33-day, cross-continental journey, my husband Roy and I.  (I’d call it a “grand tour,” but I believe that term is reserved for a different continent.)  Whether this is a brilliant idea or a questionable one, time will tell.  It’s ambitious, certainly, especially for a couple of old folks like us.

Broad overview, the trip is a quick zip straight from the West Coast to the East Coast to attend Roy’s 50^th college reunion, then a slow meander home with multiple stops to see family and friends.

Except for the initial flights that get us to New York, it’s all trains, with an occasional bus, rental car, ferry, or car ride from family or friends.  We’re leaving no direction untraveled; our route looks more like Pac-Man game play than a viable travel plan.  Click on the map above to expand it, and track this, if you can –>

A short flight from Santa Rosa (CA) to Los Angeles.  A red-eye from LA to NYC.  Off to Schenectady (upstate NY), but we’re staying in Lee MA (the Berkshires!) – and none of this is on the map; closest landmark is the NY state capital of Albany.  Back to NYC for a couple of days, then we head down to Tampa/St. Petersburg on the Florida Gulf.  Next bit, we backtrack to Washington D.C., then over to Chicago, and it’s on to Kansas City MO (Missouri for you Internationals – heart of the heartland).  From there we have to travel southwest to Ratón NM (New Mexico) in order to catch a bus up to Denver.  The Denver stop entails a side-trip to Frisco (also not on the map; west of Denver in the Rocky Mountains), then it’s over the Rockies to Sacramento, where we catch a train north to Seattle and ferry across the Canadian border to Victoria BC.  Last leg is a return to Seattle, and finally we’re homeward bound, last stop Richmond CA.

Technically, I was still on-the-job through Friday 19 May, but as I literally had nothing to do that week, and as we needed to get to NYC before Friday if we wanted to see sister Mona (she’s already left for Spain), I played hookey.  In fact, the 19^th wasn’t just my last day of the semester; it was my last day at Santa Rosa Junior College forever.  I covered my bases.  I had a note from my therapist getting me off-duty for those last few days (it’s been a helluva year), and my chiropractor offered to write a second note, if needed, explaining that my nervous system couldn’t handle the stress of another week.  Besides, if someone got bent out of shape that I’d ducked out a few days prematurely, what could they do about it?  Fire me?

A mad dash is not my normal start to a travel-holiday, but I’m not usually still at work at the start of my trip.  I was seriously pressed for time, with a bunch of loose ends to tie up at the JC (pension, health care, making it as easy as possible for my successor to transition into my job), household business to sort out, and an early summer ‘flu to fight off (a sinus infection thing – not something I wanted to carry onto an airplane).

My norm is to be packed, prepped, and good-to-go with ample opportunities for double-checking lists and scouring the house to make sure everything is turned off.  This time, with our chauffeur (my nephew Zak) already waiting in the foyer, I realized I’d taken no jewelry.  I snatched a pair of earrings off the stand, threw them into my (new, stunning) luggage,

zipped my cases, and headed out the door without checking another thing and without a second glance at the state of the house.

Roy and I have flown out of/in to the three major airports nearest us gazillions of times:  San Francisco International (SFO), Oakland International (OAK), and Sacramento International (SAC).  After crap personal experiences with Delta, American, and United Airlines and after United’s recent display of passenger-abuse, we were ready to pay a bit more for an airline with a better reputation.  Alaska-Horizon Airlines has one of the best, and that gave us a whole new airport option –

tiny, truly-local, Peanuts- (comic strip) themed Charles M. Schultz Sonoma County Airport (STS) in Santa Rosa.

Terrific choice.  Hop, skip, and a jump to reach the place.  Inside the teensy building was a small, pretty comfy combo-area with a dinky baggage claim, a few rows of seats for folks waiting for whatever, and two ticket/check-in counters.  No lines.  Great looking bar-restaurant we didn’t try (next time); you can “fuel up” and kick back just paces from all the business areas and with a fine view of the airstrip.  A bit of the romance of air travel, so brutally ripped from us by 9/11, was kindly restored by the relaxed intimacy of STS.

Yes, of course, TSA was there doing their thing, but there were no X-ray machines (yay) and we didn’t have to remove our shoes, either (super-yay).  A step beyond the security checkpoint area was a large waiting room, and beyond the waiting room was an outdoor waiting area, replete with lounge chairs and picnic tables.

Boarding was very Casablanca; a short stroll across the tarmac to our propeller plane.  Here she is, the Bombardier Q400.

Omigosh, what a sweet reminder of the good old days!  Read about the Bombardier HERE.  The wings extend from the top of the plane, so all seats have a great view.  They’re comfy seats, what’s more, with plenty of leg-room,  The free snack was a small pouch of whole-wheat, real cheese Cheez-Its^® (instead of the standard snack of 4 sugared peanuts).  Beer and wine were among the complimentary beverages.  Indeed, capitalizing on their “Wine County” location, Santa Rosa Airport offers travelers a heckuva deal.  You have to pay a $25 luggage fee for every bag you check, but you can check an entire case of wine for free!

It was an easy stroll to our next gate at LAX.  Lots of not-cheap, but also not-lousy food options were available in the terminal – and plenty of non-consumable shopping options as well.  Remember when all the shopping/ dining/ drinking venues were located near ticketing, and the gates were exclusively for boarding and disembarking?  Now the corridors between gates are like bloody malls.  Clothing, jewelry, accessories, newsstands, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, even a general market – the terminal in and around Gates 61-65 was like a wee, extremely up-scale village.

As you can tell from the pics above, this travel-blog is not going to be a pictorial wonder.  Photos are not my forte, and I’d definitely need mad skills to turn my iPhone6 into a viable instrument of photographic expression.  This one below is as arty as it’s going to get, but I do rather like it.  A travel-view overlay . . . look carefully into my shadow-reflection, and you can see through the window to where a plane is sitting by a gate.

Our America-by-train plan was based on our antipathy toward the discomforts and indignities of air travel.  We’re not afraid of flying by any means.  We’d just had it with the long lines and radiation-zone checkpoints, the rudeness and the dis-robing, the cramped cabins and sardine-tin seating.

Our perceptions were shattered by the time we landed at JFK. Like Alaska Airlines, Virgin America gave even economy-class passengers like us comfy seats, adequate leg-room, and decent elbow room.  Their safety orientation is hands-down the best ever – watch it HERE.

We were about an hour late taking off (waiting for the plane to arrive, actually), but it was no biggie; they made up the time on-route.  The only real downside to the flight was provided by two excessively verbal women in the row behind us who spent the first 4½ hours of the 5-hour flight blathering on at the top of their voices (in something Asian, but not Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Mandarin).  When the sun came up and we started our slow descent, that’s when the gals finally shut up.  Ah, well.  I’m no good at sleeping upright in public anyway; I doubt the chatter lost me much shut-eye.

Doing a cross-country marathon in this day and age . . . don’t think I’m not highly aware of the chance this provides to take soundings on the depths, speeds, and directions of America’s political currents.  That’s a big part of the brilliant-or-questionable debate.  Am I going to return from this journey more hopeful or more despairing?

With the Big Apple as our first stop, the transition out of (politically) blindingly-blue Northern California into America-at-Large was smooth and seamless.  NYC and SF are the two pillars of American progressive activism, two sanctuary cities at the forefront of the Resistance, two non-capitals of two states that are (generally) standing firm against totalitarian coercion.  That’s why it kinda cracked me up when the guy standing before us in line for the NY taxis said into his phone, “Yeah, I was worried I was going into a right-wing political climate, but San Francisco didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. People seemed pretty aware and progressive.”

Yeah, duh.  The SF Bay Area that brought the world Love-Ins and Be-Ins, the Free Speech Movement and Flower Power, that ended gerrymandering and where Jerry Brown is Governor, kooky California that #45 claims is “out of control” and that the Republican Congress wants to eliminate from the Electoral College – this guy was worried we wouldn’t be liberal enough for him?

But as we crept stop-start into Brooklyn with the honking, dare-devil rush-hour drivers on a gorgeous spring morning, I started to understand our co-traveler better.  The New York air was heavy with the scent of pride and self-importance.  No way around it.  To a New Yorker, the rest of the world seems backward and unenlightened . . . and a bit worrisome, apparently.

No worries here.  We’re on holiday.