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parking too cheap
Wednesday, July 26 2017
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York, USA
Today Gretchen and I would begin our Uganda vacation, which had been arranged by Gretchen's parents as one of their annual all-family adventures. Normally such things happen at the end of the year when our young niece and nephew have a week off for Christmas, but the trip to the Yucatan (not to be confused with the trip to the Yucatan that Gretchen and I took separately) was scuttled by a Zika freakout. Because it would be happening during summer vacation, the Uganda trip could be longer, though Gretchen's brother wouldn't be coming. He'd begun a stressful new university job several weeks before and didn't feel he could get away. In his place, his [REDACTED] mother-in-law would be going. She's not the most hardy grandmother in the world, and she's not much into science, history, or geography, but she sure loves being around her grandkids. For Gretchen's parents, meanwhile, the return to Uganda would offer a powerful dose of nostalgia; they (including a baby Gretchen) had all lived in Uganda until 1973, when the family was forced to flee under the cover of night by the increasingly-deranged tweets decrees of Idi Amin.
Our house sitters were delayed ont he Thruway, arriving a little after 11:30am. They were a young couple (both age 18, freshly graduated from high school) that Gretchen had found on the house sitters' site that has proved so helpful in recent years. We showed them around the house, pointing out where the dog and cat food are, where the various litter boxes are, what to do with trash and recycling, where to put the mail, and things in the kitchen. We also gave them a tour of the upstairs, including a brief glance into the dazzling space of the laboratory. Gretchen had made a pesto pasta dish, which I wolfed down with gusto, not knowing when I'd next be eating quality Italian food. We also gave a tour of the nearby forest, mostly along the Farm Road. That was our opportunity to outline the protocol for dealing with the situation where the dogs have treed a bear. Some house sitters might've balked at the notion of having to silently leash a dog at the bottom a tree containing a 250 pound wild member of the order Carnivora, but these folks seemed game. If it works out, they might be a good connection for the future; she (but not he) will be attending Bard in the upcoming school year.
Gretchen and I snuck off as quietly as we could; it's always uniquely sad to leave the dogs on an extended vacation. After a fairly uneventful drive into Queens, we went to park at the discount car-parking place near JFK airport. An immediate bad sign was that there was essentially no place to park our car at the car parking business. Gretchen double-parked in a line of similarly double-parked cars on the street in front of the tiny car parking place's headquarters, which might've been just an adjunct to a nail salon. As huge articulated buses and tractor-trailers squeaked past our car with millimeters of clearance on the street, Gretchen tried to find someone to hand our car over to. Meanwhile someone who apparently worked for the discount parking service was yelling at us to move our car because the particular place where we'd double-parked was blocking access to an alley. But there was no other place to park! After some heated back and forth, Gretchen decided we should give up on this place. They might've had a professional-looking website, and the rate ($80 for ten days of parking) might've been amazing, but if they couldn't actually park our car in a timely manner (with indications we'd ever see it again), then it wouldn't work. There might be people, sad and desperate people, who need such a service, and are willing to find a temporary parking spot many blocks away and then wait an hour to be shuttled to the airport in a Ford Focus with a dragging muffler, but we were not in that situation. Gretchen had pre-paid for this service, but she'd find a way (perhaps through the credit card company) to get her money back. Google maps showed us the way to a more legitimate parking service closer to the airport, and thankfully they had room to take our car. We'd budgeted enough time to make it to our gate with over an hour to spare. Interestingly, security seemed a bit lax (we didn't have to remove our shoes or take my laptop out), probably due to the fact that we arrived during a peak period.
Our travel to and from Uganda was via the Dutch airline KLM, and the first leg of our flight was to Amsterdam. Extra had been paid so we'd have "extra leg room," but we felt exposed in those seats with all that space in front of our legs, so we abandoned that spot to go sit a cozier place elsewhere on the plane (next to a guy at a window who only got up to go to the bathroom once on the 7.5 hour flight).
KLM's coach service is noticeably nicer than any offered by American airlines. There seems to be endless free alcohol, and when I ordered coffee, the flight attendant suggested I also get some cognac. Didn't mind if I did! The Dutch are, on average, the tallest people on Earth, and all the flight attendants seemed to be six feet tall and capable of turning an unruly passenger over the knee for a bare-bottom spanking. But only if necessary; most of the time they seemed friendly and helpful.
I mostly spent the flight passively consuming media on the little screen provided on the back of the seat in front of me. I watched Source Code, a science-fictiony tale wherein a wounded soldier finds himself being made to relive eight sexually-charged minutes in the body of an unfamiliar man on a train in Chicago. He's being used to work out the destination of a terrorist intending a second attack in reality simulation somehow derived from the latent memories found in the brain of a man killed in a first attack. It didn't make a whole lot of sense, although the Groundhog-Day-style repetition of the same eight minutes gamified the experience for our hero. It was like watching him play a video game over and over, perfecting it with each iteration while trying not to be too distracted by the hot virtual woman. After that, I watched the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Wild, about the not-especially-interesting hiking adventure of Cheryl Strayed. It's not the kind of movie I would watch anywhere besides on an airplane. Finally, as we approached Amsterdam, I watched an episode of the reality show Undercover Bosses, where company owners take jobs in their own businesses incognito to find out what is really happening lower down in the chain of command. Today's episode focused on the gay-friendly burger chain known as Hamburger Mary's. Several good employees discovered along the way received cash payments and other tearfully-received bonuses at the end, though one especially conniving and abrasive employee was sent off to be retrained.
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