Travelling to Boise in Idaho for my son's wedding. Notes written on 2nd Jan relating to 1st Jan.
We spent some thirty hours getting from our
house to the my daughter-in-law-to-be's house in Boise. That
was leaving our house at around 9.45 am on our Sunday, and arriving in Boise at
around 7.30 at night their time. There
were breaks between our arrival in Auckland and leaving again, and the same at
the Los Angeles end. This added
considerably to the length of the trip.
I’d picked up a cold the night below we left, and was feeling too tired
to do anything much, so in a way I was quite relaxed about the trip, more than
I would have been otherwise. It meant
on one hand I read no more than half a dozen Kindle pages on the two first
plane trips, and didn’t even read in the airports, and on the other felt quite
comfortable about the great length of time the trip involved. I only
began to feel alive again by the time we got to Los Angeles (and this was after
a night of not really sleeping well on the plane - though at least I did sleep;
Celia didn’t much at all), and that was when I started reading again, finishing
off The Eyre Affair (a novel recommended to me by a friend). My cold
seemed more like really bad hay fever, in the end, and I got something to
offset that at a pharmacy in the Auckland airport, and along with vitamin
C tablets and Panadene, kept me more alive than otherwise.
We didn't have to worry about our bags
anywhere, after Dunedin, which was good (only the easy little transfer from one
room to another at Los Angeles); the only stuff we were carrying were a largish
black holdall with some clothes and odds and ends, and Celia’s backpack with
various items including the laptop, and her purse, which carried everything
else. My older son had told us that there was a
quiet spot along by Gates 5-10 at Auckland, and so after having some lunch and
going through security, we stayed there for the afternoon, having the
occasional snooze laid out full-length on the seat. It was fairly muggy in Auckland, and earlier
on we’d stayed outside for a bit, but it drizzled occasionally, and the
place we’d chosen was obviously the smoker’s ’hut’, so we didn't stay there
long.
Our plane for Los Angeles left around 7, and
we’d been able to get a two-seater, right towards the back. This was good because we didn’t want to be
sorting out with another person all the way (or two, if we were in a
four-seater - there are no five-seaters on these planes), and meant we could
spread ourselves a bit in terms of luggage.
However, we’d hardly got off the ground before the young married couple
in front of us pushed their seats right back as far as they would go -
this meant not only were we more cramped but we couldn’t easily watch the
little movie screens. We pushed our own seats back, but being the last row we couldn’t push too far back. I asked the girl if she would mind moving
the seat back a little more forward again, and she did, but her husband wasn’t
nearly so obliging, and for much of the trip, including during the night, he
kept it pushed right back. We talked to
the hostess early in the piece but she wasn’t in the mood for confrontation it
seemed, and didn’t do anything, even though Celia said it was hard on her
back being forced to sit that way. Next morning, when breakfast was
being served, the (very) old steward (he was older than me, I think!), without
much persuasion got the guy to put his seat up straight - the guy’s comment
was, What, further? However, we
both survived. Celia said afterwards the
man had very long legs, and would have been cramped too, but…
The staff began to serve the evening meal very soon
after we took off, but in spite of that we didn’t get our meal until around
9.30 by which time there was no choice - one type of meal had been used up
completely. The older steward commented
that at least at breakfast we’d be first on the list, but even then he only
meant that we’d be in the first serving, rather than being first
altogether.
There was a huge choice of movies and tv
programs, but the noise in the plane made it hard to hear some dialogue easily,
so some movies were more accessible than others. I started to watch Puss in Boots, but
apart from it being a bit inane, it was set at night for quite a while at the
beginning and didn’t show up well. So I
gave up on that and watched the oldie, The Night of the Hunter. Directed by Charles Laughton it was a rather
weak story layered with pseudo-symbolism and some hysteria. The boy who was one of the main characters (Billy Chapin) wasn't too bad, but his little
sister (Sally Jane Bruce) was weak. Robert Mitchum
played the supposed preacher who went round marrying women for their money and
then murdering them, and Lillian Gish the old lady who eventually took the
children in. Shelley Winters was in it
for about two-thirds and had a rather underwritten role - she became Mitchum’s
latest victim. The film also seemed to
reach its climax and then develop a whole new section, making it seem more
longwinded than it probably was. Of
course I had a meal in the middle so that didn‘t help it to be more
cohesive. Roger Ebert gives it a rave review, calling it 'one of the greatest of all American films,' which seems a bit over the top for the otherwise sound Ebert.
I tried watching Jane Eyre as well, but
the sound was just a blur, so I gave up, and watched, out of the corner of my
eye, and without sound, Drive, with Ryan Gosling. It looked very slow, but well made - and
increasingly violent. Celia switched it
off before it finished.
As we were starting to descend my ears began to
ache something awful - to do with the cold, no doubt. They wouldn’t clear and it was extremely
painful. The same thing happened, to a
lesser extent, coming down into Boise.
Los Angeles airport was an unpleasant place:
lacking in humanity somehow, very undecorated, huge and awkwardly laid out - we
landed at Gate one and had to go to Gate seven, which was a good hike around
the ‘horseshoe’ that forms the airport.
We could have got a shuttle, but it seemed reasonable to walk, even
though it was fairly warm - hot in fact, considering it‘s winter here. We
decided to go up to the third floor to check out the departures section,
thinking there would be restaurants, cafes etc.
Nope, nothing but the security section, and an enormous queue, many of
them standing out on a bridge that led into the security section, in the
heat. Incidentally, the queue at Auckland into the
plane to Los Angeles took forever - we sat waiting to join it and waited and
waited. It never came to an end, and it
began to look as though it never would before the flight was supposed to take
off. They were trying to process both
Los Angeles and San Francisco flights, but they didn’t have a computer system,
for some reason, and everything was being done manually. It seemed impossible to believe that that
many people would be getting on one plane.
I had a bit of a meltdown at the LA security:
they were being rather over-the-top, and when he told me not only to take off
my money belt, but my trouser belt, and my handkerchiefs out of the pocket, I
had had it. I didn’t go off at the security
people but to Celia, who told me to pull myself together. Anyway, we got past security and discovered
that on the other side of security there were some places, like two Starbucks for
example, and a couple of bars, and a newsagents, but that was almost it. Had some rather expensive lunches sealed up
in plastic boxes, and got coffees (after discovering that the girl behind the
bar and I were both deaf - she couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t understand her -
partly cultural linguistics and partly blocked ears from the plane). Celia had a sleep, and, finally feeling
better, I did some reading. The plane to
Boise was a fifty-seater, not too noisy, and served by one hostess who rattled
through all the safety precautions at such speed that if you didn’t know the
instructions from having heard them dozens of other times, you’d have had no
idea what she was talking about.
Finally arrived in Boise and met by my son and his fiancée. Relief!
No comments:
Post a Comment