Aaaaah, the joys of travel. Like that day in April 1999 when a door blew off our plane.
OK, we were on the ground, but still. A United Airlines gate agent trying to open the door from the outside blew it – literally – when he turned the handle too far, setting off a high-pressured container of nitrogen used to deploy the emergency evacuation slides.
We were on a DC-10 en route to Washington, D.C., that had been diverted to Richmond, Va., because of thunderstorms. We ended up sitting on the tarmac for six hours until they could bus us from midfield to the terminal. The 285 passengers were not happy. One man even walked off the plane with a drink in his hand, telling flight attendants, “I’m taking my drink because you can’t stop me.”
At 1 a.m., we rented a car and drove to Washington, arriving at our hotel at 2:30 a.m.
Our bags showed up two days later.
Yes, travel is an adventure. And, as St. Augustine said: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
I have been fortunate to have read many pages during my past 19 years as a travel editor – 3 1/2 years at The Denver Post and, before that, at the Rocky Mountain News. It’s a tough job – would I lie? – but someone has to do it.
What’s even tougher is giving it up. However, after working four decades, it is time. I officially am “retired,” although I may write for the Travel section occasionally. Kyle Wagner, who has been The Post’s dining critic, will take over as travel editor.
Instead of goodbyes, I’m leaving you with some of my most memorable globe-trotting experiences.
A night in the lobby
I now can laugh about the Naugahyde Nightmare in Granada, Spain, when we slept on couches in the lobby of the Washington Irving Hotel across from the Alhambra, the Moorish masterpiece I never got to see. We had arrived in the midst of Semana Santa, Easter Holy Week, and roads were closed for street processions. Our taxi driver drove around for almost three hours until someone finally let him through a barrier.
When we got to the hotel, the night clerk told us he had given up our room because we were late – even though we had called the day before from Barcelona to reconfirm. He said there were no rooms within 30 miles.
I spotted the couches and asked if we could sleep on them. A porter brought us blankets and pillows, as if this was standard procedure. I didn’t get much sleep. Our makeshift beds were uncomfortable, and every time someone turned over, the noisy Naugahyde squeaked. Also, a loud buzzer rang every time guests returned to the hotel and wanted to be let in.
Around 6 a.m. we decided to head to the airport, rent a car and drive to Seville. As we were leaving the hotel, two giggling, giddy women walked in the door and into the elevator. They obviously had been out on the town all night. Had we only known, we could have sub-let their unoccupied room.
Knowing the right people
We thought we might have to sleep in wicker chairs on the porch of the old Hotel Lanai on Hawaii’s island of Lanai. We had dropped off our key at the desk when we left for the evening and, when we returned at 10:30 p.m., the hotel was closed. No one was at the front desk.
We had no coins for the pay phone in the lobby. So, we
dialed 911, which rang into the county sheriff’s office on neighboring Maui. We blurted out that this really wasn’t an emergency-emergency, but we needed help. The dispatcher got in touch with the Lanai deputy, who arrived shortly, listened to our predicament, left and quickly returned with the manager. She went to the desk, found our room key, then went back home.
There’s something to be said for everyone knowing everyone on tiny Lanai – or in any small town.
Chasing the sun
Around the world in 16 days – 53 hours in airplanes – was a trip of a lifetime in 1996, chasing the sun from east to west, covering three continents, five countries, one colony, two oceans and more than 21,000 miles.
Katmandu, Nepal – with a living goddess, holy men, holy temples and human hearses carrying orange-shrouded corpses through the streets to the cremation ghat – undoubtedly was one of our most intriguing stops.
So was New Delhi, India, although taxi rides were insane – zooming down roads at 50-60 mph, meeting oncoming traffic head-on, dodging cars and cows at the same time. A side trip to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal was calming, once we got past the bicycles, motor scooters, rickshaws, horses, donkeys, cows, camels and water buffalo.
There are certain things in life one must see. The white marble Taj Mahal definitely is on the short list.
Day of the rugs
In Istanbul, my obsession with Oriental rugs began, mostly because they were everywhere. By the time our cruise ship reached the Mediterranean port of Izmir, Turkey, I was willing to buy. However, I didn’t have time because I was scheduled to go on an all-day tour.
My husband wasn’t, so he reluctantly agreed to go find a rug, although I didn’t think he really would. He would rather step in cow manure than step through the door of a store.
Fortunately, my tour ended early so I had time to shop. The bus dropped us at the main bazaar where, of course, there were rugs. I took one look at the hubbub and thought Tom would certainly have panicked and run. He never would venture into there just for a rug. So, I thought, I had better buy one or two myself.
I returned to the ship, burst into our stateroom and proudly spread my rugs on the bed. “I was at the bazaar and knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it so I bought two rugs. Don’t you love them?”
Tom stared at me. “You’re right,” he said. “I would never go into the bazaar. I didn’t. I found a shop nearby and bought three.”
Back at home, we ripped out the carpeting and installed wood flooring for our five Turkish rugs. A sick cat urinated on one of my rugs, and the colors bled. I banished it (the rug, not the cat) to the garage.
Tom’s rugs are in perfect condition. He tells me about it all the time.
Zagreb hospitality
We were forced to go shopping in then-communist Yugoslavia in 1989. We had landed in Zagreb, now capital of Croatia, and our luggage didn’t. We didn’t have a stitch of underwear. No big deal, I thought – buy a couple of pairs of underpants for my husband and me and wash them out by hand at night. We would get by until our luggage arrived in a day or two.
Yugoslavia didn’t show much sign of being communist except when it came to department stores. The only women’s underwear I could find looked like a cross between women’s briefs and kiddies’ training pants. The men’s underwear looked like a union suit without the shirt – something my grandfather might have brought over as a refugee from Eastern Europe.
Both sets were made of heavy cotton – no way would they dry overnight. We had to make do with damp underwear until we reached a more commercial city.
There was a more crucial problem. My husband had only enough blood pressure pills for three days – little did we know it would be weeks before we saw our bags in London.
We were told to go to a nearby hospital to see about Tom’s prescription. A man there asked what we needed, left for a few minutes, then returned and said to follow him. The room was packed with dozens of people, whose heads turned and watched as we walked into a doctor’s office.
The doctor took Tom’s blood pressure and, through her interpreter, told him she could prescribe something similar. Tom asked how much he owed her. She laughed. Tom obviously wasn’t familiar with the socialized medicine system.
We thanked her and left, walking past the waiting people. Dozens of heads turned again. We realized what had happened. We had jumped the line – and no one objected. But we weren’t being ugly Americans. They obviously knew we were tourists and were being polite.
Return of the lost billfold
We jumped another line on a bitterly cold February morning in 1999 in New York’s Battery Park before boarding the Statue of Liberty ferry. We were told to wait in the warm office of the National Park Service guide who was going to show us around.
I was unaware until much later that I had dropped my billfold, apparently when I reached in my purse for a tissue to wipe my cold nose. Ali Awad, who was selling sweat shirts in the park, found it on the ground, looked at my driver’s license photo and tried to find me in the waiting line. But I was inside, all toasty and warm.
Awad, who had immigrated to New York from Lebanon 11 years before, called me in Denver after finding ID in my billfold. I was stunned that this could happen anywhere, let alone in New York. I asked Awad if he thought most people would return a lost billfold.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I know what I would feel like – not so much the money but all the credit cards and personal belongings and having to change things.”
I told Awad to keep some of the money in the billfold before mailing it back. “No,” he said. “I don’t want money. I just do what I have to do.”
Bad back in Bellagio
Disaster struck in Bellagio, Italy. My husband’s back went out when he reached across the bed to pick up a half-dead bee I had swatted, and he couldn’t stand up. He looked like the “Hunchback of Notre Dame’s” deformed Quasimodo. We had to return home.
I kept feeding the hotel concierge 20,000-lira bills – about $20 – (he no doubt was able to retire soon after) to get us back to Denver as best he could, which was from Milan through Washington. We bought first-
class tickets – about $3,500 each one way – because there was no way Tom could sit in the back of the plane. United Airlines provided wheelchair assistance and, because there was no jetway, loaded us onto the plane via an elevator device, just like a hot meal.
Tom needed pain pills badly by the time we landed in Denver. We had been up about 24 hours. Our after-hours physician called in a prescription to the only place open at midnight, a Walgreen’s on East Colfax Avenue. I drove across town from our home in Golden and picked up the pills. As for me, I bought a box of No-Doz to keep myself awake on the drive home.
Civil rights lesson
It was a hot August week when I made a poignant pilgrimage to the South to follow the civil rights trail. We started in Memphis, home of the National Civil Rights Museum in the onetime Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, then continued on to Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala.
Perhaps it was Birmingham that made the biggest impact. I stood in front of two drinking fountains in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. One, marked “whites,” was sparkling clean. The other, marked “colored,” was dirty and rusty.
No, it wasn’t 1960. This was 1999. At first, I didn’t get it. I grew up in the Midwest and had no idea, really, of such segregation and discrimination against blacks. Separate fountains to take a swallow of water?
Later, I watched shocking news footage of Birmingham firefighters blasting demonstrators with fire hoses, the pressure of which slammed children into curbs and parked cars. And saw clips of policemen with nightsticks loosing German shepherds on protesters. Nearby, at the park where most of the demonstrations took place, stone sculptures re-create the horrifying incidents: “The Hosing of Demonstrators,” “Children’s March,” “I Ain’t Afraid of Your Jail” and “Police Dog Attack.” They are chiseled in my mind.
So much more
There are, of course, many more memories: the D-Day beaches of Normandy, France; being in Budapest the day the Hungarian Communist Party dissolved and the Red Stars came down from buildings; traversing the locks through the Panama Canal; the monuments and statues of the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield; the Grand Canyon at sunrise and sunset; rare, full views of 20,3230-foot Mount McKinley, indeed “The Great One,” in Alaska’s Denali National Park; the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem; transatlantic crossings on the QE2 and the Concorde; watching Queen Elizabeth christen the QM2; Sinatra’s 77th-birthday party in Vegas; and Venice, bella Venice.
Ciao for now. Arrivederci. Aloha. Au revoir.
And, until we meet again, remember St. Augustine’s advice and keep reading those pages.
