February 25th, 2008
I know that the Birke was a couple days ago, but I am not writing about it yet. Much of the good story of my Birke is in the getting there, and so I need to tell that story first. It begins with a miscalculation.
The best ticket I could find left Boston at 3 pm. I teach until after 12:35, and it is over an hour and a half, so this was of dubious wisdom. I let the kids go about ten minutes early, ran to my car, and started driving. I made excellent time, so excellent in fact, that I got cocky. I decided to save money by parking in the economy lot. I parked with about 55 minutes to go till my flight. And then I waited for a bus. And waited. And waited. After about 15 minutes, a bus came along.
The driver explained that he was going off duty. So I waited some more. Five minutes later, a bus pulled up. He let me on. And waited. A minute later, another car pulled into the lot. We waited for the driver to find his bags and walk to the bus and then slowly pulled away. We went to the other economy lot. There was no one there, but we waited a while anyway.
Then we headed for the terminals. In Terminal A, a man asked the driver to wait for his wife and daughter. We did. They sauntered up a couple of minutes later. Then we went to Terminal B. After, that is, we waited for another bus that had parked us in and was taking its time. I wasn’t the first stop at Terminal B, I was the second. I finally hit the ground and sprinted to the American check in line. I got there at 2:33. The computer told me I was three minutes too late to check my bag. So I got in line and waited.
I got rerouted through St Louis. (The subject of a Jonathon Kranzen novel from which I derived the title of this post). St Louis was enveloped in an ice storm. We landed fine, but all flights out of the city were canceled. I was directed to pick up a red phone and wait for someone to rebook me. I waited over half an hour. No answer. Then, someone walked up to the phone next to me, picked it up, and immediately got an agent. Apparently, I had been routed into literal phone-hold Hell. I tried the phone they used (not hanging up the other phone–just in case) and got my own agent. She took only fifteen minutes to book me on a flight the next morning.
Then I had to find a hotel. Since half the country was stranded, this took some doing. I called a dozen hotels before finding an available room, at the bargain price of $150. (Remember, this started when I cleverly saved $30 on parking!)
The story gets boring here. I went to the hotel, came back, caught my flight, dealt with wonderfully efficient people at Thrifty Car Rental, and made spectacular time on my way to Telemark (almost too good, I thought as I saw a police car half an hour from my destination–but he seemed to think my driving speed was reasonable and lawful, and I’m not going to argue).
Coming soon: details of the actual race!
