Travel funnies 2014 – Le Mont-Dore, Massif Central, Auvergne, France

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2014

The cuckoo and the cow bell called to us…

Travel funnies* – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Le Mont-Dore in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, where rises the Dordogne River in the Puy de Sancy. We were here for the first time in 1993, so the return is long awaited, though not consciously so over the intervening years before our deciding this revisit.

 

The cuckoo and the cowbell called to us as we were climbing through the forest which clothes the steep slope of the Capuchin at the end of the funicular ride from Mont-Dore to its foot around 1200 metres up…a slightest semblance of the cuckoo which I thought at first was my wishing it to be there as it had been 20 years ago when I heard the first cuckoo in my life in this place. As is often so, I did not then recognise that what it was, was it: a cuckoo. By the time we had emerged from the forested rise at the tree line, the cuckoo was undeniably itself, not my aural phantasm.

The cow bell on the other hand was a decidedly unproven reality and remained agreed so between us until we started our return an hour later. At which point some 100 metres back down the path, I heard the plangent ping of the Reine de la Troupeau, at first a solo note and then the burst of them which means the Reine is moving and munching at the same time. She can sound like a herd when in high move and munch mode. Apart from the joy of a tone recovered, there was the reassurance that not all location has been subsumed by GPS plugins to every being with a bloodstream**.

And the violas and strawberries flowered at us

Being early summer, many of the trees were still just coming into leaf and the earliest ground flowers were about in abandon. I had forgotten strawberries, the wild ones which give the cultivated types we’re accustomed to their deserved repute mostly experienced in its absence in the Coles or Casino pretenders. Jane pointed them out in the midst of other small-flowered upland delicates. Way too early for consumption…and I’m wondering that I forgot them as an opportunity of this trip, which of course they cannot be because the season is too late or dry or something.

I noticed today on another hillside that I have much too good an eye for the small virtues of nature – the obscure bloom or unexpected one in a certain microclimate – to have never cared for bucolic poetry or music, though as I thought it I remembered that there’s a particular poem about the humble bumblebee whose provenance I cannot recall yet it is with me in some vaguely accessible memory recess…strange ways, the mind. A 19^th century English poet? But then, I didn’t know what poetry was verbal music) until I read Gerard Manley Hopkins aged around 20 as an undergraduate. No teacher bothered to mention it. Since when was iambic pentameter music??? Any more than the number one was a convenient fiction of mathematics?

 And a field of daffodils…

…filled the plain of the grassed slopes the cows were yet to munch…striking little natural daffs more delicate than the garden prepared varieties I’m used to at home, yet still briefly, leading me to wonder aloud where the peasants went who had set them out so numerously and successfully as city workers had been doing in soaring numbers in the grounds of Versailles a week ago…leaving trails of little forcing boxes around the place. Nature beats a worker most times in the beauty game.

But the hotel room engineering has a weird hanging space…

At last a traditional funny! The Hotel du Parc in Mont Dore has been recently renovated to good effect, leading the space to bed ratio and bath room swinging a wet towel ratio to desirable levels, but as seen elsewhere in French renovations there’s a glitch. There’s a built-in robe with a foot’s worth of long hanging space – enough for three shirts, a jacket or so and a couple of trousers.

 Now someone created a short-drop hanging space good for hanging pressed shirts and similar, but not trousers or long skirts; neck to belly hanging space. However, whoever did the measures on this had early adolescent sizing in mind, if anything, and so a serious shortage of adult hanging space. I suspect it wasn’t even measured other than to divide the space equally into four levels for some reason of construction simplicity rather than customer need fulfilment. Well, it obviously met the needs of the hotel chain purchasing division’s need for the renovation at best price or whatever, but the end-user?

And the shower starts in reverse…

Discovering new ways to mix cold and warm water in taps is probably one of the most useless endeavours of the plumbing engineer fraternity and here we had another variant which stumped us for 15 minutes. Intuitive it wasn’t. We couldn’t get anything from it for a while, not merely just cold or hot. Once in hand, it was obvious as the newly disclosed often is, but also purposeless. What’s the added value, as the econometricians like to wonder?

 Expectations and experience revisited…

As in Paris, Mont-Dore started out a slight disappointment for me, it never having a hope of measuring up to Alps or Pyrenees, its top most reach being the mere 1889 metres of the Puy de Sancy. But as the days have rolled by and we’ve patrolled the region with persistence the pleasures of very long views over totally green landscapes, rolling up and down many hundreds of metres never failed the danger of repetition …rather gained from it as the same sights were viewed from many perspectives and in many lights, occasionally seasoned by the soft shadows of emerging thunderheads (which threatened but never performed up to their promise, fortunately.)

And we drank about four different local wines we’d never heard of (wines of Auvergne, huh?). Between our traditional port-a-bottle approach to walking lunches for years in Europe and numerous dinners, we never had a bad one and always had viable ones for about 15 Euro or less across the selections, backed by true local delicacies in the sausage and cheese domains supported by bread of reliable consistency.

 The black shower and wash basin material

Not at all funny – amazing! It wasn’t until my third shower that I realised the slightly soft, ambient temperature-neutral material under me was also totally slip proof … as good as slip proof boat shoes of which I have a couple pair. At my age a slip is as good as a broken something which may take months to recover from. Thanks water proof room engineers. I may refloor a bathroom for safety’s sake.

*I am realising that the purpose of Funnies is to describe various arising realities in my life in concrete ways that render them truly for me and maybe so for others. Enjoy, as our culture challenges us to do.

 

**It just occurs to me that probably I can be tracked by my pacemaker if I’m in the right company. I know I can feel its speed up response to an electromagnetic source too near to its hiding place in my shoulder.

Travel funnies 2014 - Paris

Torrey Orton

June 8, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Paris which I am visiting for the first time in 5 years or so and with the advance knowledge of recovering 100 pgs. of stuff I wrote in 1972 during the last four months of our 16 month tenure here.

However this expectation was skewered by a repeat of the Charles De Gaulle airport record holding performance in the race for slowest luggage delivery in most incompetently designed baggage carousel. They didn’t get as high as the previous 1 hour wait 15 years ago, but it was 45 minutes including trying to get through the crowd squeezed in by two carousels opposing each other across a 50 metre space handling 450 folks off the full A380 we had arrived on from Dubai.

This had been preceded by a definitely record breaking taxi of 29 minutes from touch down to arrival gate, none of which was spent waiting for others to get out of the way as happens at JFK in New York with regularity. We had the Grand Tour of the airport as far as I could tell…all over the place to get to the arrival from what appeared to be behind it!

Dog drenching disgrace

One of these historical knowledges was the great Parisian dog drenching disgrace. To quote a 41 year old perception:

“Where else in the world can a dog piss on so much history with so little effort? Paris - a city of great stone losing its nature under the impact of innumerable streams of piss. Paris – the animals’ pissing post. Paris – city of sidewalks paved in dog shit….Impression of a city with an unending wealth of little yellow springs …”

So I walked up (from the Seine) to our old stamping grounds in 117, Rue du Cherche Midi this morning (June 2) and found the sidewalks paved in old dog turds with a sprinkling of recent contributions and drying rivulets of piss running off the 17^th to 19^th century 6 story apartment buildings, much as 40 years ago. Pleasantly enough I tried a local croissant just from the oven and found it typical of the genre in the best sense of both words. And our old café – Le Chien Qui Fume – was still there on the corner of the Boulevard de Montparnasse and Cherche Midi but the neighbouring once best patisserie (“artisanale” variety) has declined into banality. On the other hand, much of the length of the Cherche Midi has been transformed into high end boutiques, in no obvious way impeded by the dog doings, and nor contributing to their cleaning up. The same is the case at Versailles and the more pretentious reaches of the Boulevard St. Germain, of which more later.

Aux Deux Garcons

Last night we revisited a favoured eatery known until recently as Aux Fins Gourmets. This was our favourite not-famous Parisian eatery from back in the days when a Fr750/month salary was totally consumed by rent (6^th floor walk-up at Cherche Midi glorified by having both a loo and shower within).  Much later that year (’72) we discovered that 750Fr was the legislated salary for all foreign contract teachers at the time, which just happened to be the salary of the lowest paid workers on the Renault production line with the marvellously spun name of ouvriers specialise.

 The other Fr 750, provided by whoever was not paying the rent, was eats, cigs, papers and the occasional trip to Chez Hamadi for grilled chops and polenta at about 6.5Fr a head. Aux Fins Gourmets brought us into stratospheric reaches of 25+Euro dishes and similar priced wine (for balance’s sake, the wine we regularly drank was max. 2.5 Fr at which rate you just got a miniscule vdqs notification, and a glass bottle (or was that VOC – vin d’origine controlee? It’s been a while.). Doing this review reminds me that one of the skills in those days for drinkers of local plonk was to check for the notification of Algerian wine being used to get more mileage out of French labels (focussed on the 1Fr a litre wine market which was sustained by workers’ 1 litre a day, mostly at lunch, wine consumption in plastic bottles, so claimed an article in Le Nouvel Observateur at the time).

The Garcons of the name did a good job, but didn’t have cassoulet on - wrong season! Nor the remarkable collection of 50plus year old Armagnacs, each hand bottled, etc. Nor the overall uppermid priceyness of the precursors…which allowed an investment in a very credible Graves of recent vintage.

 Homeless Paris

Café Flore and Les Deux Magots, two of the flashiest coffee spots on the Boulevard Saint Germain were home to a homeless family (mum, dad and at least two kids, looking pre-school ) sleeping up against the Flore street awnings still at 6:45am when I walked by looking for a quiet side street to conduct some phone business with home. A small variety of clochards were wandering around my walk path the next day, leavened by a guy my age making way on a child’s mini-scooter. Not something I’ve seen in Melbourne.

 Paris unknown, and yet not

We both noticed in the first three days here that it looks and feels different from ever before and that this was an effect of the great French uniformity, the Napoleonic achievement of integrating the late medieval with the 19th century and a set of regulations which have kept the proportions that way (6 stories, etc.) and the facades indistinguishable, mostly. This ruler over every structure is then amplified by the sandy colour of the local stone and concrete look-a-likes. We have a fourth floor view up the Rue Des Saints Peres which displays the look-a-likeness of this area and contrasts it with one of the glaring modernist events of the last hundred years in old Paris – the Tour Montparnasse in its grey, near blackness of 50+ stories on the horizon, overwhelming in its confirmation that the anything at a right price part of capitalism doesn’t always win. Montparnasse is a show off. This uniformity occurs in every town of any historical substance which is part of the greatness of the country. Go anywhere and see Paris in miniature.

 I’ll take the historical over the modernist most days, but for once I am appreciating that the historical was often a bit colourless. Unless, you were among the great Louisian kings who produced the wondrous Versailles over a few hundred years and went bananas for colour on the interiors, at least the regal ones. Reminded me more of a baroque cathedral but for the bed rooms. Not a presentation I’ve ever liked but the expense is commanding.

 

How’s your day been…

There we were at door opening time (10am sharp) of Sephora on the Champs Elysees accompanied by 5 minutes of clapping and twerking or something to a noisy piece of pop by all the staff (around 25 I’d guess). After 5 minutes to find a particular brand of perfume we ambled up to the cashier, presented the item and as the cashier was turning on all systems I heard “How’s your day been…” in French, which I roughly understood, though not quickly enough not to be taken for foreign. As I seldom am, I was struck dumb that for all their linguistic preciousness (not an unworthy pre-occupation), cash and brand had deprived the staff of their standard French manners and replaced them with the faux intimacy of the Anglo world. I want to say “pathetic” but I so often encounter occasions when that seems appropriate I’m no longer sure of expressing anything by it other than my own irritated wonder.

 

Limbs may fall and such

Another piece of formulaic public language is that of warnings against this or that danger – usually the stuff of which a lawsuit can be made, or has been often enough to warrant the printing required to pre-empt suits of not warning, etc. I was ambling along Boulevard St Germain this morning before the Sephora incident and came by a miniscule public park planted next to the church St. Germain des Pres with a historical notification of its relatively recent origin in the work of an architect you won’t have known. A few metres along from the placard came another warning as follows: “In case of storm this garden will be closed” roughly translated, do not stay in this park if there is a storm but we aren’t exactly saying that. Immediately I was connected with two of my Australian favourites of the genre – “Limbs may fall” and “Overhanging limbs”– to be found on country roads carrying the unaware to notable destinations like Wilson’s Prom. At St Severin a version of the ‘overhanging limbs’ one popped up and it was hard to see the danger, as is usually the case in Oz, too.

 

Travel funnies 2014 - Dubai

Torrey Orton

June 1, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange,…this time, weapons out of kitchen utensils

Just a day and a bit pausing here in the midst of so much on the edge of nothing sustained by its paleo-historic treasure of convertible carbons…a place remarkable for its greyness leavened by occasional pastels in typically European 6 story accommodations radiating around two high-rise centres – nominally east and west Dubai, the home of the kilometric Burg Khalifa.

Around the Hyatt where we’ve stopped a second time, the evidence of the encroaching of the Gulf by piles of sand behind various bunkering techniques continues in the creating canals and lagoons for vacation housing. Here, for the unaccountably numerous time, my trekking back pack carried as luggage not carryon, with its contents of various life assisting (first-aid kits, bug defender, eating tools, wet weather stuff) goodies passed through all screening devices without even a squeak of concern in dozens of countries include this one was found to be holding a questionable item by a last gasp check after clearing customs and about to grab a gab. There was something in it (it being inside a large roll around suitcase). After opening the case and finding nothing but an electric razor in a case that might have held a snub-nosed 38 in a  cartoon and pressing on into the backpack to find a camping knife (Swiss Army multi-function type, but no projectile sending capacities of note), I pointed out there was another such scabbarded knife, too, in the mess that is the contents of the pack.

The customs lady opened it and found a beautiful scrimshaw knife of razor sharpness and about 6cm (3 inches?) length with a safety lock once opened to protect unskilled fingers from self-execution in the conduct of serious camping endeavours (which for us amount to cutting quality sausage on the highest ridge we can reach on our daily climbing in France). I had a moments’ sharp despair that this would be confiscated as a half dozen forgotten pen knives have been on passing screenings in Australia. This one, however, is a 25 year old gift from a long-term Chinese friend for some consideration long forgotten but for the gift. My despair was dismissed by a 1 second judgement of the head screener that my weapon was no such thing.

All this took three minutes… and I walked away as full-handed as when I arrived, armed for this season’s sausage, bread and wine after an adventure unexpected for a result unforeseeable as it all was in the eyes of the beholder looking at an x-ray screen with new perspectives unshared even by her co-workers. Imagine what does get through, as the Australian Senator for farming matters and moral righteousness, Bill Heffernan, recently dramatized at Parliament with his pipe bomb infiltration of the high house’s security, perhaps forewarning of future intent of his own since he sees it so much in the minds of others around him!!    

Travel funnies 2013 (2)

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2013

Rocks do fall – Squeezed, again!!

It is a source of endless entertainment to notice the various ways our route-masters attempt to preserve themselves from litigation in the name of preserving us from our emerging fates en route to whereva we’re going. Take “rocks may fall” for example, a geological salutation common to slightly hilly areas of our neck of the Australian woods running a tight race with its biological brethren “limbs may fall” and “overhanging limbs” for leadership in the fatalities by fate struggle. But I meander…

Along the switchbacks of the Mercantour there are no signs proclaiming imminent disaster by stone, though at the head of three valleys we passed up are signs looking dead ringers for Oz beach warnings to foreigners about the dangers of high surf symbolised by a stick figure swimmer about to be swamped or mouthed by a looming dumper. And sure enough, that’s what’s being warned in these three valleys only the prospect of seeing such a fate has to be a lot smaller than the Australian version. The sign warns us that local electricity supply authorities may decide to evacuate the local dam without warning. At one such spot, there was even one little permanent statuette of a religious type cemented to the bordering rock just above normal stream flow levels (with permanent plastic flowers attached) memorialising one loser to the watery maw. Death by car mementos abound on Australian roads and a couple of mountain ones we’ve recently travelled here. No implications here for the relative death prospects of the two settings.  It seems the overall road toll in France is similar to Oz. Still, I meander…

Much more reliable in the Mercantour is the appearance of a recently fallen rock in the high roads of the region. They seem to fall cleanly into the middle of the quite constricted driving lanes, often enough just around one of the blind curves provided by walls of rock rising beyond sight (mountains) along the path. Some of the fallen rocks look a lot like they’ve been intentionally placed by hand, being often quite well shaped and cubic and just big enough to shock a steering system into irrecoverable disarray. Scared me, too. Hence my feeling squeezed by the prospect of encountering a fallen rock.

Of course that’s a paranoid foreign fantasy, but I’m not meandering here. That’s how they look. Someone must have put them there, they are so neat and neatly poised so often.

Lacets.

We got to know these well in their command of mountain driving.  A lacet is a switchback or hairpin turn. After days of responding to warnings of their imminence, often in multiples specified on warning signs – e.g. 3 lacets or 4 lacets – one of us wondered at the obvious: lacets = laces?? No??  Yes! And laces on shoes or corsets are switchbacks aren’t they. Once again a true linguistic friend not recognised, because it didn’t need to be. A lacet is so obviously a switchback it needn’t be thought!!

Heinz Dijon mustard?? Really…

Over the last two weeks I’ve increasingly thought there’s been an Americanisation of French (and other European??) public cuisine in two respects. One, the emergence of American marques in the retail food sector, of which Heinz Dijon mustard in single serve plastic sachets (think any American burger bar of pre-Mac days).Did the source the Dijon marque from Dijon? I guess not cuz the sachets don’t even say where the product they contain is sourced, despite the marque!!! Of course, these were very local eateries not salons of grand cuisine. Keep posted. We’re getting near to that next week and I suspect we won’t see Heinz there.

The second respect: shopping in Casino or Carrefour here is increasingly like Coles or Woollies in Oz, where the great maestros of food marketing are endlessly seeking ways to constrain us to less choice – that’s what house brands are about. Smart FMCG folks will tell me that the Oz retail maestros actually are learning from the French. Noticeably for us the varieties of muesli which not long ago adorned the shelves of these two providers have all but disappeared, relegate to “Bio” shelves. We’ve been in metropolitan and country France pretty much every year over the last 8 or so, preceded by multiple times going back to the early70’s.

Travel funnies 2012 (5) – Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…

Travel funnies 2012 (5) –
Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…
Torrey Orton
Aug.1, 2012

 
One thing of note – Istanbul is cat city

 
Just outside our hotel – the slightly overstated Ottoman Imperial at the side wall of the Hagia Sophia mosque/church – a squad of local cats of various ages from 4 months to indeterminate, but nothing looking over 5 years, hangs out. They are not alone in feeling they own the place, have no fear of humans or anything else and no obvious reason to. Their only possible natural enemy, us, are at worst indifferent and best vigorously supportive, running feeding campaigns on the mosque enclosure wall tops or from concerned local eateries around town. There's only been three dogs in sight and they were moving on thru the square between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia at a moderate pace. Cats, on the other hand, snooze pretty much anywhere including a stool almost obstructing the passage of mosque visitors ambling into the Blue Mosque yesterday. And given a small chance they'll schmooze up to passers-by, when awake and feeling needy, with normal head-butting moves. Cat heaven or haven?


Background note: my understanding is that dogs are conceived as impure in Islam, hence the cat heaven milieu in Istanbul, perhaps! Google says: there's a history of cats in Istanbul. Even Obama scratched one on the Hagia Sophia pathways a year ago. That I would discourage, but then I'm probably an emerging animal disease vector kook…And, on the other hand, cats have a more promising history in Islam. Google "Aya Sophia Cats" for a sample of who we saw daily, including the mosque enclosure feeding grounds. We saw at least three dead ringers for members of our historical cat menagerie. Now that's genetic constancy for ya.


Jetonsmatik
There's a quite well done tram network which joins the tourist centre of town with neighbouring touristy areas. It looks a bit French, an impression amplified yesterday on the other touristy side of the water (the Golden Horn) as we were gearing up for a return from an arvo at a Sufi "Whirling Dervishes" event. There in the access path to the tram stop was a large cabinet boldly labelled Jetonsmatik, which clanged my French bell with authority. A jeton is a token. So, our hosts have a token-mediated payment system, as did NYC for years in its massively less salubrious subway system
.
However, as you've been expecting, there's a hitch. The jeton cost is Turkish Lira 2 for a ride to anywhere on the line. TL come in 1 and 2 TL denominations. But, the TL2 jeton can only be bought with TL1 coins. As I was trying to follow the obvious path of using my TL2 coins unsuccessfully a guy came along and said clearly "Nyet" when I held it up helplessly. Thank gods for other foreigners. They often have an intuitive understanding of gaps locals can never perceive.


"620 kgs gods"
A nice language twist. The Danes are just a few breaths away from English in many ways, and here's one. Looking at the guidelines for usage on the door of our hotel lift in Copenhagen I noted daily the limit of 8 persons but not the alternative 620kgs gods limit until the last day of 5. I'm still wondering about the weight of gods given the known weight of a soul (21 grams isn't it?). Or, how many gods does it take to make a good? Or goods to make a god? Eight guys or girls my size would sink the thing, being neither gods nor goods.
Stop it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again
Torrey Orton
May 18, 2011

Closed mind, open heart – a wonder about travel blindness(es)

Walking around LA a week ago, and driving a bit, too, I couldn't see much of wonder but a jumble of visuals of mildly disappointing grades. After a few hours my distress resolved into a recurring view of faux New England houses spread around varieties of Mission Revival. Mission Revival fit the environs. The faux did not for me. They reached out like an ugly stick in my eyes.


The faux had a number of features. There were the inappropriate window sizes and styles, as if they had been borrowed from a different genre. Their scale was wrong to my eye. Then there was the fault of interbreeding: colonial mixed with ranch – two regenerations from the post-war era. Again a travesty of proportions signalling a bungle, arising perhaps from architects mixing pages from two standard issue design playbooks. In a related, later discussion with the architect of my two friends, he mentioned a similar construct as the design process of another local travesty (in his view, which I shared).


I was in the in the hands of two aficionados of local architecture, hence cautious with airing my disappointments. Rather, I managed to enquire about what I was seeing – its sources, ages, and social implications. After a few more hours my automatic rejection of the offending mis-proportions retreated almost unnoticed from the front of my awareness. It then became easier to explore with them. What's going on with me and this?


A Kimberley experience.


A few years ago I spent two weeks driving and camping around the Kimberley. I had looked forward to the experience with a mountains-and-seas anticipation - that is, my normal expectation of pleasurable visuals which has applied to every trip in my adult life: local, interstate or international. I had forgotten those formative visual experiences like learning to love the Australian bush which opened me to previously unknowable things in the world. It's hard to spontaneously like the Australian bush from a Massachusetts bush background – almost no congruencies other than being bush.


The upshot of the first few days in the Kimberley was a lingering disappointment with its failure to be alps – Australian or European! Now, I had no excuse for this. I have travelled fairly broadly and sometimes deeply in Australia for 35 years at this point. I have done so with enjoyment from my first exposure to the flat lands between Melbourne and Geelong in 1971 (my closest priors being a few glimpses of the Connecticut River valley in the 1950's and a day driving in Ohio in 1967) and can champion the deserted regions with energy and commitment to newbie travellers down under.


So, in some sense I had lost contact with this openness in myself…amazing failing, even more so because I did not even know I had lost it!! I still cannot follow how this happened, but happen it did. I underwent a covert regression or created it somehow. As I am writing I begin to see how, maybe! I brought to the Kimberley an unintentional biased eye – the one that announces itself with an act of disapproval of its field of vision.


Maybe it worked this way. My experience of the European Alps over 35 years, but more intensely in the time before the Kimberley, had coloured my expectations about great visual and physical experiences. A moment ago I was about to write it had coloured my preferences in such experiences, but that is not what it was; it was my anticipations blending into my expectations: I was looking forward to more Alps because I was only getting a taste for them, and wanted more, but did not quite know that then. The Kimberley, by choice at that time, fell across the pathways to that acquisition. It required special organising of many others to do the Kimberley as we thought best to do it, and the others turned out to sometimes be an unexpected experience in their own right. Another disturbing distraction.


Like the LA experience, the Kimberley emerged from the overlay of my inappropriate anticipations and expectations as one of the most memorable of my travel experiences, marked by my continuing desire to return for another run under the cold night skies and warm day ones of early winter there. Maybe it will be on our grey nomad agenda one day.


So what?


This has been a long detour from faux colonials falsely accused. The explanation of my visceral resistance to what reality was presenting is adequate; the pathway to less resistance is not so clear; its implications are worrying for learning…or, just a naturally occurring stage/phase in learning?

More travel funnies…

More travel funnies…
Torrey Orton
May 11, 2011


We're off to my 50^th boarding school reunion, a family reunion and a France reunion for a month, with various interludes and postludes along the way. I start with preludes.

 "No record of reservation…"
Travel funnies started before the travel this time with the news by email that our reservation for the reunion had never been received by the Heritage Hotel…a discovery thanks to a query from classmates about the state of our accommodation and such since the school had no record of them (not that they should have since I'd never sent them and no one had asked for them!). I was rabid about the news, driven by the fact I was awake at 3am to receive it and had dopily turned on the email.

I fired off a note of complaint to the school's event manager with my reservation number and date of approval (Feb 10, '11). …. And somewhat later set off for a morning's therapy at 7am by train and tram, whence another unfunny chapter opened unexpectedly, disappointingly and totally unnecessarily.

Back to the trams…where months ago I noticed that I often entertained myself with pre-work exercise in segments marked out by the train/tram route on the way there. There was a theoretical hitch at that time: that I occasionally almost got it wrong - "The almost is the lurking awareness that I could still mess up, or be messed up, by misjudgement plus fate" I noted at the time. Wait or walk, I wondered again this morning.

Well, this time, already angered by the accommodation screw up a few hours earlier, I walked and waited in vain. Arriving at one tram stop, I had five minutes to go to the next scheduled tram and was caught midway by an early arrival passing me by, stopping at the next stop and waiting for two minutes for its schedule to catch up with it, and then moving off just as I caught up with it!! This sequence was repeated two more times as my pre-work walk turned into a 40 minute, 3 kilometre quickstep to the clinic, arriving 12 minutes late. Fortunately, the expected client was s serial lateness offender and bore the wait well (forewarned by SMS of course). Still, I was smoking, but only wisps showed.

 (The accommodation bungle was recovered three days later, or so I was promised by email.)

 LA International Airport…incoming
There's a song which celebrates the West Coast entry to the US. Well, it was an undeserving entry this time. Apart from an eventual 1 hour wait in an incoherent and disorderly queuing system, we got a standing room only wait in the plane on arrival due to congestion in the entry hall. We were told there were a thousand just-arriveds standing in our way. I should have known we were really in for trouble when I sighted a sign saying something like: With our 140 years of customer service we know paying attention to customer needs counts! I read this as a line from the mouth of LA Tourism thinking they really have reached heights of self mockery. A few metres further up the passage I saw the words were an HSBC bank self-promotion, but then…

Joining their last members (maybe 500 folks or so) 15 minutes later, we started our passage in a hall with no toilets other than a pastel sign promising renovations of the previously available offerings were well under way…and this after 13 hours in the air.

The entry hall was itself quite new, with numbered ranks of passport control stations spread in a 150 meter array before us. Trouble was, they were less than half staffed, though they were armed with a terrific set of terrorist detection tools – both iris cameras and handprint capture machines. There was not even a hand-lettered sign telling us which line was for foreigners and which for returning natives, though there was a quite well-designed one for diplomatic and special business travellers, of course.

 LA …outgoing
A day later we got the AA treatment (no, not that AA; the American Airlines AA) on the way to our next stage. The boarding routine was a marvel of self-contradiction which seemed to work. There were stringent carryon bag limits clearly posted around the departure halls with explicit threats that oversized ones would be thrown into the hold (delicately by their experienced staff waiting hopefully below the plane to receive renegade bags from watchful cabin staff).

The warnings were enough to make me slightly antsy about the somewhat oversized backpack I was carrying. No need to worry. Others were carrying material for a beach party. Due to my abiding never-be-late phobia, we had arrived early and due to Jane's possessing a higher grade of Frequent Flyer, we boarded in the first rush scoring empty overheads for the effort. What came next was a scramble by the masses to grab space which was close to the unconscious meaning of unseemly…not quite pushing old ladies out of the way but an outbreak felt imminent.

Coaching from the sidelines was the chief speaker for the cabin staff - running through the outsized bag routine as a request for civil compliance rather than an order. She backed up the civility theme by encouraging the scramblers to "help each other" with the short, weak and maybe old as worthy targets for help (if they couldn't lift their overweight bags, couldn't get them to fit the compartments (quite a few), or just couldn't find space, though passing the weight and size reg's). After 20 minutes wrestling bags, jockeying for position and "helping" the place was cleared for take-off. Lots of bags disappeared under seats in front, to the point of leaving little foot space, but then whose fault was that.

Was I seeing another instance of a self-regulating system at work?? The last I remember was the response to the US Airways flight #5149 which crashed without loss of anything material but itself in the Hudson River in January '09 (just where we were heading!). Cameras monitoring the area of the crash (by chance) caught ferries and other boats turning to save passengers before formal rescue could have been organised. Local players had chosen to disregard their SOP's, city, state and federal regulations with probable risk to their licenses and captain's bars to do the obviously right thing. Perhaps an example of "giving forward", as my niece described an effort of hers to make a difference in some family matter. More another time.


Fly well, fly high.