Join Me in Snarkville

Updated with the photo link. 

Ahem. Just in case you are ever in this position, learn from my experience. When in doubt the man in uniform with a gun will ALWAYS win. It is as universal a truth as bread landing jelly side down and when mama is not happy nobody is happy.

Allow me to explain. After a delightful week of hard, grueling work on the ship scouting and suffering for Sea Socks ‘08, I boarded a bus for Seattle airport. I boarded said bus in Vancouver and had to go a whole 158 miles and across the border. I was ready for a delay at the border, but not what happened.

First, we had the most negative bus driver in the world. He hated Canadians. He hated that he got a ticket the night before. He was not happy. He got on the announcements and said, “crossing the boarder will take between 45 minutes and 4 hours” then he kept on talking. He spun people up around me and I was forced (for my own mental health) to calm people down. we sat in line at the border for something close to 2 hours before talking to anyone. Then it happened.

Customs Guy boards the bus and says. “Ok, everyone will need to get off the bus, but you can leave you bags.”

Bus Driver argues: “But these people just got off a ship and we came directly here.”

CG: I understand, but it is procedure and I will try to make it as a quick as possible.

BD: This isn’t right….we are all Americans {note, this was not true}…

CG: Um, sir. You need to go park over there please.

At this point, the bus driver tells us that this has never happened before.

All of the doors to the bus were popped open. There dogs sniffing. There was a dog who wagged his tail four times or whatever. Next thing I know, we are off the bus with our bags walking through customs.

So, I’m standing there in my line, mentally calculating my total time in Canada since the beginning of the trip (less than 12 hours) Total purchases: One backpack.

A new ticked off customs guy walks up to the older gentleman next to me and asks for his bag. He proceeds to search it. What does he find? Prescription Meds. LEGAL Prescription Meds. Was it completely apparent that the only reason his bag was searched was because there was a greater chance that he had meds in his bag than mine? Oh, you bet.

We get through customs. Then everytime there was any sort of slow down on the road, the driver would get off the highway and drove surface streets. URGH.

My flight was at 3:16pm. We arrived at the airport at 3:10pm. Double URGH.

I planned on flying stand=by on one of the three later flights. The customer service lady told me “Not going to happen, the earliest I can get you out is 7pm tomorrow night.”

Um, yup.

Ok, so I got put up in a hotel for the night and while surfing the web, I found a routing through Portland that got me in 5 hours sooner. I took it. Finally, I got home — but what an experience.

The good news is that I met 8 wonderful women from Mexia, TX and we had a blast together during our side trip.

Oh, did you want to know what I saw on the cruise?

Ahem, Flickr to the rescue.

(Written at the beginning of the journey)

August 12, 2007

Sitting in the airport at the worst hour possible: 4:30am. The problems with this are HUGE. First, the coffee place is NOT open. Oh, there are people there playing with money and turning on the machines, but I am being taunted with the IDEA of coffee and none of the actual caffeine. Next, there is my bag.

You see I carry this lovely laptop in a backpack type bag. I picked it up to throw it on my shoulder as I exited the car this morning to discover one of the cats (and I have a theory) has sprayed it. I have ode to cat pee coming from one of the straps of my bag. And as you guessed it, there is NO bag vendor open at the airport at 4:30am. I briefly wondered if the kind people of the coffee place would let me move said laptop to one of their paperbags — but I fear the level of protection it would provide. At this point, I’m unsure of my course of action. Do I try to clean it, knowing full well there is no way to get the smell of ode to cat pee out of ANYTHING? Or does it get tossed just as soon as I can find a bag vendor with an option? Urgh, and my mind can not process any of this while the lovely Peet’s person is teasing me with counting change at a shocking slowly pace. Does this woman not understand that the Queen without her coffee is like a day without sunshine?

Unrelated to any of the above:
For sale CHEAP, one kitty. Very friendly. Sweet and kind. Unsure which you may receive in the box as it could be a kitten OR an older cat ticked off at me for shoving meds down her throat. I will pack in bubble wrap and ship to the destination of your choice.

Also, unrelated to any of the above:
I’m suddenly seeking opinions for laptop bags. All thoughts welcome. Priorities include: lightweight, protective, easy to carry, fit in overhead OR under seat in front of me; and look as little like a laptop bag as humanly possible. I’m considering roller backpack. Bonus plan would be if it could also hold plane knitting and perhaps might be unattractive to a cat.

Updated to add:

There is a lovely, although slightly stinky ex-laptop bag in the Vancouver airport. I found a bag vendor there and paid probably too much for a CLEAN backpack, but I got the mission accomplished. I swapped out the bags and then had this horrible thought, someone is going to see me leave this OLD bag in the airport and there will be a bomb squad and everything. I thought about telling a security officer what was up — but frankly trying to explain that I brought cat pee over the border freaks me out a bit. So, I opted to shove it in a garbage can and walk away very, very quickly.