Friday, June 5, 2009

DIA-ternity

How hard is it to get a friend to drive you to the airport? (for humourous response see Jerry Seinfeld's stand-up) For us, it take a very very special person (who needs no recognition here)
Especially when your plane takes off at 6am which means you have to be there an hour prior and still your hour drive up necessitates a 3am departure. Who wants to fight that traffic nightmare? We ended up passing the evening away in Denver downtown after getting our rail passes from the belowmentioned Harold. With some of Earl’s classy cuisine to give us strength, we made it to DIA 10 minutes after the automated ticket kiosks closed. (Open for your convenience from 3:00 am to 12:15 am. Yeah, in the dead of the night, it takes me a while to do the math too.) We showed Danielle Brandon’s Personal Physical Contact Continuum to kill the first hour or so. (Very touching or I should say a lot of touching-Brandon presenting, Taggart demonstrating. };b ) Our chauffeuse heading home, we searched for a place to camp out. You wouldn’t think it would be difficult to find somewhere with sufficiently comfortable chairs, an outlet that worked, a WIFI signal, and without someone ripping on religion he is too ignorant and beef headed about to merit any respect regardless if he’s wearing a cadet uniform. Settling on the floor below the ill-bred boor, we sat across the breezeway from this unique mural:

Funny isn’t ithow we seem to have sent the children of the world in their most stereotypic native costumes to represent us on Tatuine and they were able to overcome the general of the Sand People. (Walking single file didn’t help you, did it? Bantha breath)

Posting our first blog ever (yeah, seemed to have mastered it pretty quickly, eh?), we passed our time mostly awake, maybe not alert, but awake. (Even though some of us had been up since 4am the morning before after only 3 hours of sleep even still…I digress and take you along with me) Blah blah blah….Oh, I didn’t sleep on the first plane either thanks to my garrulous seatmate, Kevin. He and his friend own a spots drink company and made a million dollars on his one day trip for their LED light company and gave me his snack bεg (that’s “bag” with a Minnesōtan accent, he’s from St. Paul, but lived in Colorado Springs for a time, flying helicopters for the Army, in ‘Nam too , lost 14 buds over there…). He also ran a company making airline seats. Did you know that all the seats on an airplane are on rails so that if they wanted, they could cram more rows or take out rows depending on how much legroom and capacity they want to get? That is why the windows don’t line up right. Always get the one with one and a half windows.


Hustling to the next gate didn’t do a whole lot as the tram between terminals lost power and trapped us inside for a few minutes. Before cannibalistic panic ensued, the doors slid open and we burst out of there like a 12 pound infant 6 weeks overdue. Speaking of tight, confining spaces, we apparently book the flight from Minneapolis to Kansas City on a plane the FAA needs to check cite for insufficient escape capabilities and flight attendant attention. Our carry on sized luggage, too big for the overhead compartments and too big to shove completely under the seats, protruded so much that Taggart’s knees looked like two bald midgets sitting on his lap. But the two “bigger guys” net to us got split up into the empty last row. Thus, he slept soundly enough to miss his opportunity for airline snacks and complimentary beverages again.


A brief layover in the Kansas City air-hut, Taggart’s sister and brother-in-law, JoLee and Nate (pleasant surprise to see him off work), picked us up. Finally, a few hours of work, packing and passport searching, driving to Denver, 27 hours of travel, the series finale of Quantum Leap and an episode of the Cosby show got to us and we passed out.

Until the dinner bell rang.