Day One: Getting there

I don't suppose that it's any surprise that things went the way they did. Not that it's all bad, but I'd been struggling with a premonition for weeks that getting to Tahiti was going to be fraught with challenges.

After months of fretting, a week ago it was finally apparent beyond argument that Ms. Morita would not be able to join me in this excursion. Perhaps it was for the best, we reasoned, as her home has been attacked by virulent black mold since an upstairs neighbor left the faucet on, flooding the woodwork. Every day brings a new issue as the water flood has turned into a flood of destructors and constructors who are gutting her floorboards and replacing them with something a little less toxic. Her presence is needed at home, and she has already begun to make other plans to fill her time with fun, even if it's not on an island.

Still, my mind had been on the passport issue greatly, which makes what happened even more ironic. The day before my flight was the 4th of July, which I hadn't made many plans for. A last minute game night with the guys on the 3rd prompted me to move my "Invisible Forest" meeting to the 4th however, which put me right in the neighborhood for Oliver Crow's 4th of July gathering which I had also just heard about.

I saw a lot of faces that are too often absent from my view lately: Elizabeth, Alexis, Oliver and Elyse, Andy and Lorelei, Eric, both Edens, Joseph and more. I hung out longer than planned, and would have hung out longer but I was concerned about not being rested and ready for my early flight the next day.

I got home, and did several sweeps of the apartment, looking for anything that might need to go in my overstuffed bags. I normally travel VERY light, but the high expense of food in Tahiti had been impressed upon me, so everything that looked like it would keep started going in my bags. Eventually, I fell asleep around midnight.

I woke to my alarms at 4:45 in the morning and took care of final preparations. I put my bed back in the wall and revolved it so that the cabinet faced out to the room again. I grabbed my, now extremely heavy, bags and waddled the two blocks to the BART station. Almost an hour later I was at San Francisco International Airport, riding the AirTrain to the terminal, thinking about Mayuko and her passport issue when it hit me.

My passport.

In the drawer in the cabinet. In the one place I didn't check because my bed was down and I couldn't get to it. Out of sight, and very much out of mind.

It was 6:15am and there was no way in hell I was going to get to Oakland and back in time. I went to the Delta terminal and found out that the next flight to LA wasn't until 12pm. My flight out of LAX to Tahiti was at 1. That wouldn't work.

I drug my back breakingly heavy bags back to BART and got a drowsy call form Mayuko. My brain was spinning. I could try to get a flight to LA out of Oakland. Then it hit me. I had a three hour layover in LAX. I needed to get to LA, but I didn't have to get there on Delta. Southwest has frequent flights to LA, so I called up the Oakland airport while on BART and made a reservation for the 9am Oak to LAX flight. If I missed it, there was also a 10am flight.

I got home, drug my sinew popping bags back to the apartment, ran up the stairs, grabbed my passport (exactly where I knew it had been), ran down the stairs, grabbed the bags and drug them back to BART again.

The Oakland airport is a very short distance from me, but you have to take a shuttle from the BART station to the airport. I arrived, raced as fast as I can while lugging what began to feel like metric tons worth of baggage, and made it to the Southwest terminal at 8:20.I got my ticket, checked my elephantine bags and headed to the security line. The line resembled a particularly long lived tapeworm. I trusted in my karma, as I had let a rather frantic young woman cut in front of me last week when I was flying back from San Diego, and asked for a similar favor which was freely granted. Having bypassed half the line, I moved through security without incident with fifteen minutes before my flight departed. I was at gate 17, which was the absolute furthest gate from the security station. Shoes untied, I jogged the entire length of the airport to see my flight in the midst of boarding. I had made it with perhaps five minutes to spare.

So I used the restroom quickly.

The flight was blissfully uneventful. I was only going to be about 15 minutes off my original schedule. I had lost a few years off my life, but what of that?

I landed in Los Angeles and called my contact. A yacht supplier had been contacted by Bill and Linda a few days earlier for some last minute repair parts. He had sent some to me at the office, but a few more (the most crucial parts) had arrived since then and so he was going to meet me at the terminal and pass them over. This we did at the baggage terminal, and I decided that all this was for the best as I could just put the boat parts in my heavy bags rather than try to explain the odd devices in my carry on when I went back through security. We chatted and waited for my bags.

And we waited.

And we waited.

And the baggage machine came to a halt and we were left practically alone in the claim area.

For myself, I was not too concerned. If I arrived in Tahiti with the clothes on my back and my laptop and camera, I could get alone fine for a week. I could easily buy a swimsuit and some bare essentials once I got there. But I had a lot of food and stuff for my hosts in those bags. We learned that the bags had been put on the 10am flight... the one I had tried to hard to avoid having to take. My companion assured me that I had plenty of time, as he had made the flight to and from Tahiti many times. And so we waited until 11:20am when the baggage from the flight began to arrive and my bags came out mercifully early.

Now, one of the larger parts that he had sent me earlier was being replaced by a better part that had just come in. So I began digging through my bags in order to find the old parts to do a swap. I was unable to find them, and my concern was growing about missing my Tahiti flight, as there was only one flight a day. What I did discover was that certain items had broken, despite my having packed them with lots of padding, and that my entire bag smelled strongly of rum and tequila. I removed the larger pieces of glass from my baggage and disposed of them while my temporary companion sanguinely suggested hitting the duty free shop on my way to the gate. A brilliant idea, and one I would not have thought of as I've never had cause to enter a duty free shop before.

I passed through security with my highly alcoholic luggage without incident, hit the duty free shop and replaced the tragically lost booze, and made it to my gate as passengers were in the process of boarding. My margin was improving, as I probably had arrived with about 15 minutes to spare. Everyone jammed into the tarmac shuttle and we sped across the runway.

Once seated, I wondered if Mayu's recently cancelled ticket would leave me an empty seat next to me. Indeed, it seemed as though the entire middle section next to me was empty and I might even be able to sleep horizontally on the flight. Then a nice young lady asked a question in french to the three women in front of me, and they all checked their tickets and moved back a row. Three generations, like a polynesian Hecate, sat beside me. So much for stretching out. Still, it couldn't be helped.

Once we were in the air, I went to use the restroom and when I returned the lady to my left pointed out that the two seats across the aisle were empty. I could have sworn I had seen people in there earlier, but people seemed to be resorting themselves. She had asked the attendant and it was fine for me to move over. So I did, and they got room and I got room. The next time I made a bathroom run, I noticed how full the plane was and how very lucky I had been to score such a bonus... especially since the controller for the entertainment system at my old chair didn't work.

From that point, the flight was painless. I had been through the worst of it, and made all my connections despite my travails.

The fact that I had not seen the small box of parts in my run soaked belongings vexed me, but there was nothing to be done until I arrived on the island.

When I did, however, and got a cab to take me the short distance to the airport motel, I found that the box was nowhere to be found. I must have left it on my desk at the office.

I am normally a very drama free, competent traveler, but I had managed to mangle every step of this expedition so far. As I unpacked my goods, putting all my soaked clothing in the shower, putting dry clothes aside, and throwing away the towel and socks that were too encrusted with broken glass to be recoverable, I felt an odd peace. The worst that I had feared had happened on this trip. Point for point, everything I had dreaded happening had occurred. As I poured the remaining glass shards into the garbage can, and took a cold shower, rinsing my clothes until they no longer smelled like the town drunk, I knew that from this point on it would be easy. I would find out Bill and Linda's next port of harbor and pay the cost to do an international fed ex to the docks. As the dealer had pointed out, they done without them just fine for several weeks, and they could wait another week or two for them. The crucial part was safely in my bag.

I was asleep by 8pm, which to my body was 11pm, and I woke this morning to the sound of the domestic roosters that live in the homes near the airport.

I am in Tahiti.