Geekrant vs the Sci-Fi Hotel.

Greetings Geekranters!

Welcome once more, to this record of my crazy life on these transatlantic shores. I'm continually blessed that so many of you choose to join me in my quest to understand the differences, this new life has bought me. So I knew I must continue my writings in record time, for I feel it would be unfair to leave you caught in narrative limbo waiting for the resolution of my own epic tale of airport bound purgatory.

As you may remember from last time, December 23^rd 2017 found us, Mrs Geekrant and I, caught by the mercurial fickleness of mechanical difficulties, in the halls of O'Hare International Airport, Chicago, Illinois. We had just found out that our flight had been canceled and would not now leave until 7 o'clock the next morning, Christmas Eve.

Right then, my homeland somehow seemed more distant than it ever had until that moment. Still, I have always thought that, one must make the best of the circumstances that we are handed in the meandering walk that is life. If I didn't think that, I'm not sure I would have ever made it to the U.S., let alone have made it back home again. One thing that does help in circumstances like these, is the lengths that airlines will go to to make arrangements for hotels and meals. Also finding shuttles traveling to aforementioned hotels and meals.

So it turns out that there was an upside to our tale of aeronautical woe, we were blessed with a stay in a four star hotel, the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, for free. Now, it has to be said, no hotel stay can really ever totally compare to sleeping in the house you grew up in. Neither can it assuage completely the anxiety that a canceled flight can bring to the travel-worn voyager. It really can't but it can come very, very, close.

In all these months since I moved here, I have realised that one thing my northern English upbringing and Mrs Geekrant's Minnesotan childhood have in common is we were both were taught to assess a life situation relatively pragmatically and learn what a lost cause looks like. So while other airline passengers herded around the gate, trying desperately to get seats on another airline leaving that night, we took our meal vouchers and left in search of the shuttle. In our wake, it was as if the anxiety and annoyance in people reached such a crescendo that it was if the atmosphere around the gate seemed to be filled with chaos, hanging like a cloud.

So, as a result of the silent riot building back at the gate, when we reached the shuttle it was fairly empty. We made the five minute journey to the hotel, through still, quiet streets that seemed to have decided that even the busy traffic of the Windy City could take a break for the Christmas season. Looking out into those silence drenched roadways, I tried to lessen the anxiety that threatened to overwhelm me with the powerlessness of the situation that we found ourselves in, conjuring out of the quiet concrete and tarmac, some kind of urban peace, as we reached our place of refuge for the night.

It may have occurred to you, dear readers, from the stories that I told in my last post, that growing up, I had little experience of hotels. Raising four children in a small town in the north of England, my parents never really had the money to afford a stay in hotel. My mother would spend forever, it seemed, planning our summer holiday, trying to decide the right place to stay. Making the most of what little money they did have. Country cottages and static caravans on holiday camps were generally our forte. Holidays abroad were definitely well beyond our reach for much of my childhood.

Not that I ever minded, I have seen most of the different areas of the United Kingdom and all the beauty it has to offer. I have seen Jane Austen's grave in Winchester Cathedral, walked through medieval market streets, trod in the footprints of the saints on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. I have felt the wind chasing in off the Atlantic, breaking on the cliffs of Cornwall and sat on a heather strewn hillside in Scotland. I have heard the stories of a thousand years of history and the beauty that is unique to Britain. Considering where I would end up living, it seems somehow ironic that I didn't leave British shores for the first time, until a few months after my sixteenth birthday.

So it has to be said that staying at a fancy hotel like the Hyatt Regency, was never really something I ever expected to be doing in my life. It was a lovely hotel, but also somehow, a creepy one.

The shuttle dropped us off outside the doors of the hotel at around 8'oclock that evening. The night air was frigid and ripe with the promise of snow. In the reflected light of the streetlamps, the hotel stood still and silent, like some modern day fortress, a safe haven in the icy depths of the night.

In the moment that we walked into the hotel's lobby, I realised that there was a reason the airline was able to find us hotel rooms for the night. It turns out that a hotel for businessmen, five minutes from the airport, on the eve of Christmas Eve, is deader than a consumer electronics store in an Amish village. It also happens to feel like a set from some paranoid sci-fi film from the mid-1970s.

The lobby was huge, with a central area that had four elevators with glowing lights underneath them, only a few hotel staff could be seen behind the desk. Strange looking sculptures hung from ceilings or protruded from the ground like other-worldly plants. Brutalistic concrete clad the walls, accentuated by wooden paneling and mezzanine floor after mezzanine floor rose to the ceiling, each level planted with seemingly fake greenery (although my wife assured me it was real).

It may have been my upbringing, the friday nights spent with my father watching old sci-fi films or action blockbusters in the early hours of the morning, but in that moment, I felt like had stepped into Logan's Run, or was about to see just where Soylent Green was made. This perhaps was where the alien invasion was to begin, where all the conspiracy theories had started. It should also be noted that similar to Michael York in Logan's Run, my life-clock felt a little low, the stress and anxiety of the delay had taken their toll. So maybe I could be forgiven for an overactive imagination... oh who am I trying to fool, I don't need an excuse to see science fiction in... pretty much anything.

Somehow though, all of the delay, the canceled flight, the distance, made me think all the more of home, the home I grew up in. It seems that stepping out into this world and leaving all that we have known brings us into a new appreciation of where we came from. Our memories become transformed in the alchemy of experience and time and become something more than when we made them.

Memory, I'm learning, only becomes of benefit to us when we step out and try to tell a story that lies beyond what we have known. The day we are willing to let memory inform us, guide us and no longer trap us. Every day, it seems this life and the one I knew get further away physically and temporally from each other and yet come ever closer in the peculiar corridors of the inner workings of our hearts.

All that to say, in that moment, I remembered watching 70s sci fi films with my father and my mother complaining about the implausibility of plot and heading to bed while we watched on into the night. It brought me home, in that moment of weakness and powerlessness, and made me realise how no trouble truly lasts forever and home is still waiting for me. Both here, on Earth, in the U.K and the U.S. and one day, in the home we never leave, beyond this life.

I couldn't sleep that night, we had had a nice meal downstairs in the hotel bar/restaurant, all dim mood lighting with neon bar signs, but I still couldn't sleep. Maybe it was too many movie moments running through my mind or simply the knowledge that I mentioned in my last blog, that breakdowns, accidents and mishaps always happen in the early stages of a journey or on the way home. Whatever the reason, I awoke suddenly at 3'oclock in the morning, which was, in hindsight, a very good thing. My phone blinked with a message from my mother, Our flight had been canceled ... again.

It has to be said that at this point I had had enough and Mrs Geekrant also had. This was definitely a good thing. My wife is one of the most patient people on this Earth and comes with the birthright of being “Minnesota nice”, which means she can express exasperation with someone and still make them feel like they've had a wonderful day. Maybe it comes from her job as a coffee shop manager, who knows. However when she saw the message and found out that a rescheduled flight wouldn't leave Chicago until Christmas Day, she decided that enough was enough.

Logan might have ran in the movie but we ran that night, or early morning, as it now was. In our tiredness and stress it all happened in a blur. We were down in the lobby in a flash, headed out onto the shuttle by three thirty in the morning, into the airport lickety split, where my wife charmed a British Airways flight, leaving that evening, out of the airline representative. We headed back to the hotel, slept some more and made our way back to the airport for our new flight.

It may seem that I am rushing to the end of this part of the story but by this time, everything was passing in a waking dream and I have little desire to recount the same things in reverse. We had nothing left, and although the new flight we were on flew into Heathrow not our usual airport in Manchester, all we cared about right then was the fact that we were well on the way to my homeland. They were some of the last seats on the flight and we lost the upgrade we had purchased on the previous flight, we were cramped, suffering from sleep deprivation, full on worn out but we had bested this stage of the journey and we were flying into the rising sun and a new day.

Until next time, which will hopefully find me talking finally about my actual visit home.

Goodbye Geekranters!