Come Fly With Me!

Last year Amy and I logged close to 90,000 air miles each as we traveled from performance to performance and back home again. We love to travel. More specifically we love to travel together. I can't imagine traveling like this apart from the one I love, though I know so many today have to do this very thing. In fact Amy's Dad traveled extensively around the world by himself when Amy was growing up. That kind of travel can be very lonely. Amy and I are very thankful to be able to share so much of our life literally side by side or piano to piano!

Travel, by and large, is considered a glamor industry, and for many this is the case. Travel often times means an adventure beckons! An exotic destination awaits! New sights, new sounds, new tastes, new experiences, new stories to be written, lived, and recounted once back home again embody the hopes and realities of the yearly or semi-yearly trip. Of course, when you travel as often as we do, the sense of being on another "trip" takes on a definition more closely related to a Grateful Dead concert rather than the Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii!

First there's the packing, which we now have down to an amazing art form and can complete in about 40 seconds before we walk out the door to the airport. It used to be we would plan our packing like NASA plans for the thrust to weight ratio of a space shuttle mission. Days in advance we would consider the necessary wardrobe, toiletries, basic life support essentials, comparing and contrasting these with show gear - laptops, travel printer, microphones, wireless monitors, etc., - to find the perfect balance of carry-on to checked luggage, weight to space ratios, luggage management on the ground for optimal two-person piloting through airports, on and off shuttles and into hotels, all while complying with Federal transportation and Department of Homeland Security regulations, state and local laws, Judeo-Christian values and precepts, political sensitivities, the Golden Rule, and the Boy Scouts of America code of honor!

Next - ground transportation - to and from the originating airport, the destination (or destinations) airport(s), hotel(s), performance venue(s), restaurant(s), local music store(s) - for gear we either forgot or the airlines broke - clothing store(s) - for clothes we either forgot or something gooey exploded on and ruined in our luggage, computer store - for computer crashes... wait, we own Macs, they never crash... dry cleaners, FedEx, bank, Kinkos, wi-fi hotspot, hair cutter place, and a 24 hour Starbucks because we've had all our blood drained in favor of caffeine in order to keep up.

Flights - this one is actually pretty easy. We learned early on to grant loyalty to a single carrier in order to rack up frequent flier miles and earn as many travel perks as possible. The number one rated frequent flier program in the industry belongs to US AIRWAYS so we signed up. The good news - Because we travel with US AIR so much we do get upgrades and other perks often. The bad news - We get upgrades and other perks often because we have to travel so much...with US AIR! Hey, at least they're still almost solvent. Air travel, with any carrier just isn't the glamor fest it once was. Unless you've done hard time in a dingy, dirty, sweaty, Mexican jail, you have little preparation for the joy that awaits with the experience of each new flight.

First, there's the lineup. We're all single file as our documents are checked by a security officer who, if not scowling at you, is probably screaming at everyone to have id and boarding pass in one hand, your baggie holding only 3 ounce containers of liquids, gels, or anything else they last minute decide should now be on the list of "what-goes-in-the-baggie" in the other hand, your carry-on bag in your third other hand, while balancing your laptop on your nose so as to not have to stop moving and thus slow down this already amazingly efficient, friendly, and well-oiled machine of a security line.

Now it's time to strip. Off come the shoes, off come the jackets, off come the belts, off come the rings and watches, off come the bras with heavy under-wires, out come the fillings from your teeth and everything goes into the sanitary gray fun-tubs which are never available because they ran out of them an hour ago and no one in an official capacity has yet replaced them. So you step out of line to find some... and get yelled at for stepping out of line, or yelled at for taking one of the afore mentioned coveted tubs from another line of stark-raving-mad, barefooted, pants falling down to their ankles, passengers who have also been lined up like convicts on death row. But this is not death row. No, now it's more like a strip club. We're all half naked at this point and really just need a brass pole to descend from the ceiling, some bow-chica-bow-bow music, and a mirror ball to complete the security check-in process. I think I might actually appreciate it if someone stuffed a dollar bill into my shorts while enduring this line. But that will never happen because someone is yelling at you to keep your boarding pass in hand while stripping, juggling, pushing gray boxes, and holding up your own clothes!

Of course, if you're really lucky, you might get put into the goose-puffer machine line! Some of you know what I mean. The telephone booth-sized box with Arthur Murray dance footprints on the floor.  You stand inside, when instructed, and wait for it to, without warning mind you, blow hurricane force puffs of wind in strategic places down and up your body from head to toe ... always complete with a nice goose in the end! I've heard women scream, and giggle, and I actually saw a man's toupee get "puffed" clean off of his head and right out of the booth onto the x-ray machine. Good times were had by all!

Assuming one successfully navigates all of this then it's off to the gate where you can breathe easily, right? Guess again. Now comes the mob scene. All eyes are on the gate agent as the 30 minute before-the-flight-is-scheduled-to-leave-but-we-know-it-won't boarding process is about to commence. She warily eyes the uneasy and restless crowd. We glance back, but try not to make eye contact so as to alert her to our intentions to rush the gate as soon as she reaches for the public address microphone. We hate it when fellow travelers do this very thing, but we ourselves are powerless to resist the survival instinct that swells within and commands us to do everything possible to survive, to live, to fight, to conquer, to take captive that which is more precious than gold... an empty overhead bin above our seat! She shuffles. The crowd, like a mob of zombies from Night of the Living Dead inches forward. She reaches for the mic. The mosh pit takes form. She breathes in to speak. Our salvation is at hand and our forward movement is no longer subtle, but more a feeding frenzy of great whites. She speaks... "The flight's been delayed..." The mob is hit hard and thrown back as if a giant shock wave from an atomic blast has ripped through the area. We're stunned, in pain, anger, disbelief... which is crazy because a gate agent's first words are always, always, always.. "The flights been delayed..." followed by a bunch of bullspit we don't care about anyway. And so we wait.

Of course, eventually we do make it on to the plane, sit on the runway for as long as it took them to build the runway, get where we're going, after having had pretzels the size of microbes but marketed as "gourmet" thrown at you, land early but arrive late because there's no ground crew at the gate, get to baggage claim, which really should be called baggage lottery because the odds of actually getting anything are about the same as Megaball, pick up the rental car, not the one we reserved because the guy in front of us got that one - as Jerry Seinfeld says, the agency is good at taking the reservation but not so good at keeping it - get to the hotel - after getting lost because Garmin is working off of maps published in the 16th century - discover we can't check in because the client forgot to make the reservation to coincide with our flight itinerary, go to soundcheck, choke down some food, perform, and head back to the room exhausted, only to discover our high-tech key card won't open the door... AGAIN... so back down to the front desk, back up to the room, and we realize we made it! We survived another day on the road and are encouraged that we can do it all again tomorrow. So Amy and I sit back, relax, open up the room service menu, select a nice plate of fruit and a glass of wine to celebrate the triumph of the day, pick up the phone and push the room service direct dial button... and get a recording that room service closed for the night right about the time we had to go back to the front desk to have them re-issue our room key! At least Amy and I get to share this together. What a lucky girl to have chosen to come fly with me!