Geek Rant vs the Mid-West Delay.

Greetings Geekranters!

My pen rides again or rather it writes, as I promised it would! After all, how could I leave you without more of my observations of the life I have come to live? In, all honesty, I think I write for myself as much for anyone else. This place and the differences it has from the place whence I came, leads me ever onward in a quest for understanding. If I get to share it you, my dear readers, all the better. My thanks to you, for tagging along for the ride.

So, welcome to the continuation of my latest series, the mad-cap, laden with mis-hap, far from drab, story of my return to the land of my birth. It is literally, the land of my birth, by the way. From the back bedroom windows of my parent's house I can see, up on the hill, the hospital I was born in, barely a mile away. That's very close to be to your birthplace wouldn't you say?

The description and discussion of the environs in which I grew up must wait a while, however. First, there is the matter of leaving the United States and crossing that greatest of all great lakes, the Atlantic Ocean. Often, it seems to me, the start of a journey, takes as much effort and time as any other part of it, whether that's crossing the seven seas in an aeroplane or my parents, 20 years ago, jamming their four children, into the family car for the summer holiday.

One thing I learned from my parents and those holidays long ago, if something's going to go wrong, its going to go wrong then. For instance, I am reminded of the time we'd already driven over an hour away from home and my brother realised belatedly that he'd neglected to put on his shoes. There he was in the back seat with nothing but socks on his feet. He had to wear his old worn out, spare set of shoes for the rest of the holiday, a serious purgatory for a young teenager. I sometimes wonder if his extensive Adidas Samba collection stems from this past hurt.

Things can go even more wrong the more inanimate objects and other things outside our control are involved, especially companies and machines. For instance, when you arrive at the airport three hours early, get through security quicker than you ever have, have a romantic “beginning of vacation/holiday” meal, get to the gate early and then... get delayed. And then your flight gets cancelled. Yes, my childhood observances were correct, if things are going to go wrong, they'll do it from the start. However one thing kept me going during the tense moments of the story I shall relate. In the midst of all the chaos... I least I was wearing shoes... my brother taught me that.

A visit to an airport in the United States is an interesting event, not least because every airport is different. Also because Americans very often have a different attitude to air travel, than say, the reserved, queue etiquette observing, British have. A British traveler, in my experience, will get to the airport hours early. They will queue in an orderly fashion for security and check in, wait patiently at the gate as if every chance to queue is our birthright, an hereditary chance to remember Dunkirk. Americans, on the other hand, seem to arrive ten minutes before boarding and expect to be able to complete all that they need to in said ten minutes while all the while wolfing down a Big Mac.

Now, it may seem that I am doing Americans a disservice, going for the cheap laugh, utilising widely drawn stereotypes of different nationalities. I'm not, in fact, when I'm checking my passport is where I left it for the fifteenth time, I wish I had more of a laid back attitude to flying. The truth is, the Americans' commuter-like approach to air travel can be attributed to the way that many smaller flights, internal to the US, are just like catching a bus or a train. Arriving early is not always required.

This is reflected in the design and feel of airports within different cities within the U.S. For many British and international travelers, we only tend to see larger transit hubs on our journeys in the States, huge exchanges of planes and human cargo, labyrinthine mazes with multiple terminals and futuristic feeling monorails zipping us from one terminal to the other. We very rarely see the smaller airports of this massive land.

Dane County Regional Airport, Madison's airport which stands only 5 minutes drive from where I now write, has a very different vibe to O'Hare or any other large airport. Its small, has one terminal and last time I went through it, security took me 5 minutes, literally. Its pretty quiet and is easy to get to and leave from, unless you're my mother who somehow managed to set off the metal detector last time she was in there. Still, to anyone but the matriarch of my family, it does have the chilled out feel of a provincial bus station.

O'Hare definitely doesn't feel like a provincial bus station and its no Thomas the Tank Engine railway branch line either. We were very happy, on our visit, to have got through the Dante inspired seven circles of security required for transatlantic travel in these post 9-11 days, in reasonable speed. We'd left Madison at around one o-clock that afternoon, driving out of Wisconsin and through Illinois' flat landscape under icy blue winter skies that seemed to go on forever, we'd left our car with a friend, got our bags checked in double quick time and, as I said, got through security just as quickly. We had a lovely meal in an Italian restaurant and then made our way to the gate.

The gate is really where it all went pear-shaped, as the British say. Sitting opposite the gate alongside a young family, parents and a couple of children, the boarding time displayed on the gate was six thirty, then it was seven thirty, then it was ten thirty. The family started to look worried, we were worried, their toddler started to tire and we realised that we better call my parents and then tell we were going to be delayed for a couple of hours.

Then the announcement came over the public address system, “This flight will not be leaving today.”

It is hard to describe the feeling that goes through your mind in that moment, for most people, it can be difficult to know you'll be delayed. I've now know that when the journey that is being delayed is your first trip home in two years, things can easily become overwhelming. Suddenly, a simple mechanical difficulty on an aeroplane becomes something liable to cause a metaphysical crisis in the exile looking towards the shores of his homeland.

In the two years that I have been away from home, I realise that distance, both makes the heart grow fonder of the things we have left behind and, by necessity, makes us adept at hiding that fondness and the fact we have missed all those things so much. It is, I feel, something central to the survival of the immigrant who leaves not because he dislikes the land he started out in but as found something greater in the land he is going to. We protect our hearts from the pain that the differences bring sometimes, so we might embrace with a whole heart, all of the things this new land has to bring.

To hold such fondness and look with such anticipation at the day of your return and a delay looms in front of you, then it feels like all the separation once again is built anew in your heart.

It would be wrong to suggest that I dislike my life here, or this country, for I do not and have learned to love it as nearly as much as my own. Still, in that moment, I was truly filled with an exhausted feeling of despair which showed my unspoken homesickness. I also wondered what we were going to do. The airline people had said the same flight would take off at six the next morning, but that would be Christmas Eve and we had wanted to be in the UK by then.

They gave us meal vouchers and sent us to hotels that they had secured bookings in for us. So deflated and wondering about what the other passengers, especially the young family were going to do, we set off through the airport's plethora of corridors, seeking the exit and a warm bed for the night. We didn't trust the airline's promise of a flight and it was a good thing that we didn't as I will tell in my next post. In that moment, however, we were just glad to be going to a hotel.

It made me think about my parents, packing up the car for two weeks in whatever country cottage or holiday camp they could find. Four children and all our supplies, for want of a better word, piled into a car that suddenly felt a lot smaller than it had merely a day before. Then we would set off out onto the road, like the covered wagons of the pioneers of the great American wildernesses. Still it was never easy, and things always went wrong on the way. I once decided to develop car sickness, in the middle of Bristol, on the hottest day imaginable, inside a car that had no air-con, being driven by a father who wouldn't open a window because it would “throw off the balance of the car” Did I mention there was a traffic jam?

All of this happened on the way to our holidays, so I'm thankful every time I travel, for the things my family taught me. Thankful for the knowledge that the best travel plans of mice and men fly out of the window the moment you start travelling. I'm also thankful that I know that when being sick out of a car window make sure to lean all the way out, otherwise you'll get it all down you and your mother will throw out your favourite Captain Scarlet t-shirt and you'll never see it again.

Finally I'm thankful that I know that there are some things you can never forget to travel with... passport, money, change of clothes, shoes on your feet. Its true! I pretty much survive international travel because one morning Andy forgot to put his shoes on. Every journey to see Mrs Geekrant and back again, has been coloured by one morning, twenty years ago, halfway down the M1.

My family taught me all that... and in the next few blogs I'll talk about seeing them once again and how good that was, oh and how Mrs Geekrant thought she was going to drive us into a waterfall.

Until next time...

Goodbye Geekranters.