Fresh Brains

It is 6am, I'm on a plane (again) and I feel like a zombie. Forever
banished to stagger the earth's airport terminals in search of a gate and
intelligent conversation.

There is a excellent scene in "Sean of the Dead" where he is sitting on
the bus hungover and half awake and on his way to his dead end job. The
funny thing is that he doesn't notice he is surrounded by zombies. They
all just look as tired and bored as he is.

So that's how I feel.



A friend called me and asked me how I was doing. All I could respond with
was

"I've spent two weeks on the road living in strange hotels, eating alone
and having business meetings with people I will never see again."

"If I don't have a real conversation soon I'm going to kill someone. What
I need, my friend, is fresh brains..."

Not only am I a mental train wreck, but physically I'm not much better. I
picked up a cold on the flight back from London. So for the two days I
actually had at home I spent most of then limping and sniffling and
moaning around the house searching for more kleenex. My head felt about
two sizes too small and the last thing I wanted to do was get on another
plane and fly back across the country.

Compound that with the jet lag from London and all the cold wanted to
make me do was sleep, so my internal clock was totally out of whack.

Thus clogged, tired, mentally under-fed, and as usual, cranky, I had to
drag my arse out of bed at 5am this morning to spend the day flying to a
mysterious tropical island. To add insult to injury, there was no hot
water at home so I had to debate the benefits of a cold shower whilst
nursing a cold or spending fourteen hours on aircraft with the rest of
the great unwashed.

Somehow I made it to the airport and continued the zombie shuffle: Wait in
line for check in, kick bag forward, wait in line for coffee, kick bag
forward, wait in line for security, kick bag forward, wait in line for
xray, dump bag on conveyor, wait in line for bagels, kick bag forward,
wait in line at the gate, kick bag forward.

When I finally did get on the plane it was totally empty, there were
about ten of us in there. It just added to the whole 'last humans
alive' thing I was experiencing.

As my plane lands I find out that not only do I have change terminals in
Denver but there are no staff around so we have to hold at the gate for
20 minutes. This means that I have to do the unthinkable and run for my
next flight, which, unfortunately, I reach, gasping and wheezing, in
enough time to have no overhead space. As icing in the cake ( literally )
we are 'this close' to take off before we have to turn around to hold on a
de-icing pad.

Of course, none of this factors in the added detail that my last leg is on
a different airline, so I still have to go through a second check in in
Miami. This is something you really never want to do.

So, after landing late, we do the shuffle again: check in, security, gate,
lather, rinse, repeat. Except as an additional bonus I got 'SSSS' on an
interim boarding pass and told.

"You'll have to go to the gate for a seat assignment."

Suddenly my two hour layover became negative 10 mins and I was going to be
bounced because the plane was too full. I also ran into some colleagues
who almost missed the flight because they didn't realise they needed
passports. So we all just stood around looking stupid waiting for someone
to tell us where to go. Eventually they let us on the plane where we sat
for some indeterminate amount of time without actually going anywhere. I
was sure the handlers were debating which heavy bags they could 'just
leave behind'.

I knew things were really bad when the pilot left the cockpit, looked at
me, and the chaos around us, and said "What a fiasco."

Not having had time to stop and eat. All I had for a response was to groan
un-intelligibly and say "brains, we need brains."

Sometime late in the evening I got to the hotel, having never seen
daylight.

I'm hoping for the day that someone perfects teleportation. Ill gladly
pay for any technology that can get me there in an instant, sober me up
and remove a few kilos in the process.

Travel smarter.



Tags travel,bahamas,hotel,airline,restaurant,bar