Of flights and follies

May 15

Morning: last-minute purchases, packing, and goodbyes. Afternoon: Go time! Driver arrives late. I tell him to sit in the passenger seat; I’ll drive. He says: “A man after my own heart,” and, moaning that I’ll never make my flight in time, he spends the rest of the ride working through scenarios on how I could push my way past the lines to get to the gate in time. (“When you’re late, you have to be ready to make a scene,” he declares.)

Get on the road at 3:45 p.m., plane boards in one hour and fifteen minutes. Heading into the City at just before rush hour. Will I make it? I’m behind the wheel and we get to JFK in just over one hour. Complications at check-in (I’m not listed as a passenger, fussy passport scanner, bag is overweight, etc.). Complications at the gate (delay, delay, delay). 4:30 flight finally takes off at 5:45 p.m. And so trip begins!

The flight is just a quick hop to Dulles, where I meet with Nandini first and then the rest of the group trickles in. We hug and mull about excitedly. I make last-minute goodbye phone calls – my U.S. phone won’t work in Argentina, I’m told. Different sort of network, or something like that. I’m tempted to keep it turned on during the flight because I’m curious to see when exactly the service clicks off (when we leave Florida airspace? Over Cuba?), but I graciously defer to the FAA.

We board a 10:00 p.m. flight to Buenos Aires. I’m in the very last seat in the plane, squeezed between the plane’s wall, a seat that reclines all the way into my lap, and a mild-mannered business type who throughout the flight claims variously to live in Tokyo, D.C., and Buenos Aires. His English isn’t good, and he’s clearly jet lagged, so I decide he doesn’t understand my questions and ignore him.

Airlines are great hosts. It’s probably 11:30 p.m. and they serve dinner, waking up everyone who had begun to doze off. Packed into that 767 like Argentine cows, we all stare blankly ahead and eat the meal – what else is there to do?

I get some good reading done. Power through Grisham. Next up: “The Thumpin’” – about the overwhelming Democratic victories in the ’06 elections and the man behind it all, DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel. But before that, a quick literary detour. I’ve brought with me “The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel.” I’ve had the book awhile and read it several times, but figure this is a good time for a quick refresher. I start with the “how to survive an airplane crash” chapter since it’s relevant. I’m comforted to learn that the back of a plane (despite the noise, the drowsy foreigners, and the tight quarters) is the safest place in the event of a crash. I continue perusing the handbook. I know I’m headed to central and northern Argentina, so I skip past the unlikely (how to control a runaway camel, how to navigate a minefield, how to cross a piranha-infested river) and try to memorize the action-steps in more feasible scenarios (how to survive a mugging, how to escape from a car hanging over the edge of a cliff, how to foil a UFO abduction, etc.)