What's That Smell? Part Four: De Plane! De Plane!

Well, well, well; first blog of the new year and also this marks the completion of the first whole year of this masterpiece of writing. Time flies and I have written some truly breath taking things; my god they are so beautiful. They make Olivia Munn look like a man by comparison. Anyways, new year; new tale so here we go!

(Imagine this with laser sound effects in the beginning)

Date: January 3rd 2011
Time: 4:30 am  (PST) - 9:00 pm (CST)
Place: San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Grand Forks

So I'm preparing for my epic journey back to the motherland. My chariot is going to be the awesome Super Savers Shuttle; you know the blue vans where you nearly die reaching your destination. The guy was late, no big deal though. My flight was at 7:00 am and I was the first one to be picked up out of what turned out to be 4 people. The Russian Bear ( my driver) finally picks me up and I wave bye to Mandi only to sit outside for another 10 minutes as he plugs in the next location on the GPS. Finally we get going, and we pick up who turns out to be a run of the mill dumb as dirt sorority girl*. Next up some old self righteous woman who felt the need to say the following things time and time again: 1) "I'm going to Thailand to teach English." 2) "I got a call saying that they were going to pick me up in 5 minutes. He didn't show up so I tried to call this number because I thought that he missed me." (She said this like the driver was deaf and or not there) 3) "I don't get it, my flight is from SFO to L.A. and then to Thailand; why do I have to go to the international terminal? I don't get it?" Our fourth was a lady who much like myself said nothing, except what airline we were flying.

Um, so the flight to Seattle was not bad I guess. The airport sucked big fat wieners. Then as we are about to board the flight to Minneapolis they decide to abruptly change the boarding time to 30 minutes later. YEY! I love sitting in this shitty airport with a Hudson News stand! (This was what I thought). We then get on the flight and here is where the fun begins.

I'm riding bitch. Again like from SFO to Seattle. Super duper. Then I try to watch Predators and find out my MacBook Pro's disc drive is on the fritz, looks like I'm reading the whole time. As we get ready to land the same dance begins: I need to get the fuck out of there to find my terminal and people won't move their god damn asses; "Let's just take our time; that's how accidents happen." SON OF A B! This was a problem because for my next connecting flight was scheduled to depart in about 45 minutes and boarded in about 15. So I race literally through the Minneapolis airport stopping only to pee. I then reach my terminal which was conveniently located on the exact opposite side of the airport. Once I got there, two things happened. 1) My flight time was changed to 30 minutes later. So I rushed through the airport looking like a tool for no reason. 2) There was this guy who looked 100% like a turd bomb teacher of mine, all the way down to the hipster glasses. He resembled him so much that if anything had happened to him, this guy could fill in for him and no one would be the wiser.

Finally, the flight is boarded and who sits by me? Not the guy I just mentioned. I know it seemed like I was going that route. It's this old fart who decided that he was going to annex my leg room and claim it for his chair. He then decided to play with his cell phone and text. Good god that was hilarious. His phone had the classic old guy leather case on it that was cool for about 1.5 hours in 1995; and he took about 5 minutes to send a simple three line reply. How do I know? It was to me. Just kidding, that would have been weird. Seriously though I was so flabbergasted by it that I couldn't take my eyes of it. It was like a car accident almost. So painful to watch this guy try to be hip with all the youngens. Although the next thing he did was more on the side of sad and tragic. After he annexed my leg room for the greater good of seat 5C, he decided he wanted to get some work done and he whipped out his brief case. No problem except for the fact that his brief case contained a few pens, a crumpled magazine, and a legal pad with some scribble phone numbers and names. It reminded me of that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer went to work and the only thing in his brief case were crackers. So he went to work and started off on a real hot streak, writing down a name or two. Then for the next 25 minutes he would stare into space and then scribble something for two seconds and stare off for five more minutes. Having accomplished a mountain of pressing paper work he called it a day. About 20 minutes later we land and go through the same song and dance. "Hey lets just stand here for awhile".

Thus concludes the journey from San Francisco to Grand Forks. Will anything exciting/annoying/crazy happen on the way back? Stay tuned!

* I will go into depth at some of the brilliant comments she made later. Good stuff.