The Road Home Part.1

My day, June 6^th flowing in to June 7^th, began with a not well rested me staring down a pile of bags as my iPod play the overture of Within Temptation’s “Black Symphony”. The nearly eight minute long epic swelled in to its proper opening after about a minute and a half of theme establishment, just as I stood up to start dragging my luggage outside. Good timing. I decided to be clever, using a trucker’s hitch to attach one duffel to the top of another, a belt providing the rope. I don’t think I’d get any points for my hitch, it certainly wasn’t elegant, but it did what it was supposed to and it held, and isn’t that really the whole point?

My cab was ready early, early enough for the driver to watch me pull the bags all the way to the trunk. I really wish he’d gotten out and offered to help. I don’t think that there are too many people carrying 5 bags around at three am to confuse him. He did help me pack them in the trunk, sort of, since his first configuration didn’t fit. After I wiggled things a bit we could get the trunk shut. By exactly three a.m. we were on the road to the airport. The driver had obviously been smoking in the car since it reeked of smoke and cheap perfume cover-up spray. One or the other would have been fine, and honestly the smoke would have been better than the sickeningly sweet flower scent of the cover-up. The combination was enough to nearly make me gag. The driver also had a severe wheeze, which he mentioned had been a long term issue. He also has chronic shortness of breath, dizzy spells, and heart issues. He thinks its due to high altitude. Doubtful in Wales, or any of the places he said he’d recently been on vacation. The one fun thing about the drive was when his regular boss made a social call to the driver. His night off was going well, he’d been to the pub and had some drinks, picked up a girl and described his activities back at her place very vividly over the speakerphone. She was making him breakfast.

At the airport the driver was nice enough to get me a luggage cart, though he sent me in through the wrong door. It turns out he wanted a cheap laugh because when I come back out, maybe 3 seconds later, he was outside cracking up. I wheeled my bags down the sidewalk and through the proper door, and got in line for check in. This was about three-thirty a.m. Check in was supposed to start in ten minutes, but ended up not starting for forty. It was a major production to check in since I hadn’t had the option to pay for my bags in advance. That required calling a manager. Security wasn’t a big deal, my belt prompted extra chemical testing, but otherwise no trouble.