Croatia

[OnyxCougar]

Preko from the ferry.

[OnyxCougar]

The view out the window of the "summer house"

[OnyxCougar]

The proprietor turned some muzak on, and turned it up in the house, which made it background music as we sat and talked about things. Turns out he's german, and since Hrvoje is the only one who sprechened deutsch, he was elected leader of this merry band of wierdos. There were no menus. He came and asked what we wanted to drink, we all chose coke. He went away, came back, brought 4 bottles of coke and a glass with ice for each of us, poured the coke into the glass, and then we had a choice of fish or "beefsteak". Kelle heard the word "beef" and her eyes glazed over. We all knew what we were having. Four beefsteaks were ordered, and I swear Kelle almost had an aneurysm waiting for this food to show up. The guy told Hrvoje that he'd take us on a tour of the castle (that I still didn't see) if we wanted.

The first thing out was a small loaf of sliced, warm bread and a little dish of butter. It was devoured within moments. Then he brought this....cole slaw type cabbage stuff. Now, anyone who knows me knows I despise coleslaw. But I was really trying to broaden my culinary horizons, and really really hungry, so I managed to choke down half of the stuff. Kelle wrinkled her nose and offered it to me with a shit-eatin' grin on her face. The boys seemed to think it was fine. Hrvoje seemed to think I was "making fun of it" or something, and was telling me to be nice, when I WAS being nice, and really making an honest effort to eat the stuff.

Thank Gods the main course came. "Beefsteak" was not what I had thought it was. It was a thick hamburger shaped cut of meat. It wasn't hamburger, but it was very similar. You could pull it apart with your fork, but the texture was that of a steak. It was the weirdest thing. But it was GOOD. You never saw two people rolling their eyes in ecstasy over a damn hamburger as we did. I think Kelle had a "personal experience", but I'm not sure. We sat back after we scarfed the food down and engaged in idle discussion. We got talking about the MUD, and Kelle and Hrvoje got into a "discussion" that resulted in me and Kelle preemptively leaving. The boys followed behind us about 5 minutes. Kelle and I talked and walked around Sutomiscica with the boys keeping behind us, but in sight. They caught up to us at the harbor, and Hrvoje and Kelle kept walking, while Ivan and I sat on the stone/shell/coral wall and talked for awhile. It started to get cold, so we headed back to the flat, climbed that damn hill again, and waited by the Joan Wilder gate. It was about 3pm-ish, and I hadn't brought a jacket with me to the restaurant, so I shared Ivan's jacket with him. We decided to walk again, and find Kelle and Hrvoje. We walked back to our stone wall, and saw them coming out of a bar. Kelle had made a potty break. We walked back to the flat, up that damn hill (I was really getting tired of that hill) and relaxed in the apartment.

Twilight was coming, and we settled in for the night. I got my Croatian language notebook out, and Hrvoje was going over that with me, Kelle was using her art stuff to draw the window, and Ivan was reading my copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". Not long after, it was dark, Hrvoje had corrected all my mistakes, Kelle showed us her window, and Ivan was looking at Hrvoje's corrections and making his own notes in my book. Kelle broke the CD's out and we started listening to Jeff Foxworthy. We were all rollin'. We munched on stuff we had brought with us from Zagreb. It started to rain, and there was some water creeping in the broken windows, and Hrvoje handled that with some blankets he had cleared off the beds. After we listened to both CD's, I remember falling asleep (couldn't have been later than 7pm), and waking up through the night to thunder and lightning, then falling asleep again. I slept till after 8am the next morning.

[OnyxCougar]

Day Eight (Sunday)

Woke up to the bells of the church ringing. I think my ears are specially attuned to them or something. My eyes just popped open. I realized I was hungry again, and Ivan was already awake. Kelle and Hrvoje were still passed out on the floor. Ivan and I talked quietly for awhile, then went down the hill to get a sandwich. It was a beautiful day, the sky was blue, and there were the big, thick, fluffy clouds out. It was Sunday, and in the land of Catholicism, stores close at noon or before. We went to the store across from the soccer field, and watched some teams play as we ate our sandwiches. We decided to get up and keep walking around the harbor. We ended up actually walking on the rocks of the shoreline of the island, and on one of the little jetties we saw a crab. I took some film of it with my camera, but it turned out crappy. I did manage to get a decent picture, though.

I'd never seen a black crab before, or a crab eating, or a crab eating another crab. It was weirdly compelling. Ivan didn't understand my fascination.

[OnyxCougar]

We continued walking along the shore, on the rocks, and I'm proud to report we didn't fall once. My ankles were starting to ache, so we decided to pack it in, and go back to the flat. We walked up a pier to some people's house, and Ivan was freaking out because we were trespassing. I told him, "Look. If the owners freak out and call the police because we are walking through their NON fenced, NON posted back yard, just let me do all the talking. We'll act like stupid American tourists." He thought about that for a minute and nodded, "OK." So we walked to the front of the house and found the alley that conncted us to the street we had walked up to get to the shore. Turns out we hadn't really walked as far along the beach as we had thought. Back up the damn hill to the flat, and Kelle and Hrvoje were just waking up. We discussed options for going back to Zagreb. Did we want to stay another night or leave today?

I looked down at my arms, hand and ankle, all of which had big red blotches where the mosquitos had feasted on me. In addition, I had 2 bites on my left ankle that I think a spider had a snack, too. Must have felt left out. I looked up at Kelle and voted, "today". Ivan also voted for today, mostly because he wanted to go see a movie. Then I found out that the ferry didn't leave until 5:30 that night, and the train didn't leave for Knin/Zagreb until 9pm. Hell yeah, I wanted to leave today!! We were blowing another day in travel.

We started repacking everything, and got everything together. By the time we locked everything up and headed out, it was past 1pm, and it looked like more clouds were on the way in. We walked past the church and looked in the yard. Flowers were EVERYwhere, remnants of all saint's and all soul's days. Kelle noted that all the flowers sat on the top of the graves, and there were lots of flowers on the entrance and entryway to the church itself. "Wait a minute! I thought you aren't supposed to walk on the graves on the dead! I thought that was like, bad luck or something." We stopped and discussed it for a moment. Both the boys are Catholic, and neither of them knew what the deal was with that. I've looked on the internet, and asked people at work, and no one knows where that originated from, but it seems to be a global respect thing. Just seems weird to me to bury people underneath the floor of the cathedrals, like in Westminster Abbey, or in the churchyard on the way from the gate to the door.

We got to the main road to Preko, and looked around. No one knew when the bus came by to take us to Preko, so we discussed waiting at the stop versus walking to Preko. It was about 3pm, partly cloudy, actually a very beautiful day, and we decided to walk it. Hrvoje carried Kelle's 2 big bags and her backpack. Ivan put my backpack on and pulled my suitcase behind us (thank gods that thing had wheels). We started out down the road to Preko, then turned off the road and walked along the coast. There is a street that followed the coastline, and as we turned a corner, there was a "fountain" (for lack of a better word), with a statue of a woman washing clothes. Now, Ugljan doesn't have desalinization plants, so the people of the island collect rainwater to drink and bathe and wash their clothes in. Apperantly, this is the place that the women of this village used to gather and wash their clothes in the rainwater that had collected in the fountain.

We eventually worked our way around to Preko, and bought the ferry tickets back to Zadar. It was 4:30, and we had an hour to kill before we needed to board the ferry. We sat in front of the restaurant/bar/ticket place, on the steps. One of the things I found irritating about Croatia was that most restaurants have outdoor seating. Basically, the inside is so small that they put the tables and chairs outside. Sometimes there are canopies or umbrellas or awnings, but they are still outside. Now here is the thing: You have been walking all day and your feet hurt. Here are about fifty tables sitting outside these 2 or 3 restaurants and you can't sit there. Why? Because if you sit down, you wanna buy something. So you can't sit at any of these 200 chairs just because you're tired. I hated that. So we sat on the steps, about 6 feet from the tables and chairs. I was seriously considering buying a damn hot chocolate just so we could sit at the table. The clouds were rolling in again, and it was getting chilly. A hot chocolate would have gone down real nice right about then. But I was comfortable on my little ledge, and we were all talking and none of us really had the energy to move. So we didn't.

[OnyxCougar]

We left on the ferry. It was getting dark, made more so by the clouds overhead, and we arrived in Zadar as the sun set behind the church at the harbor. Kelle and Hrvoje hadn't eaten yet, and Ivan and I were getting hungry again, having only nibbled on sandwiches, and the guys decided they wanted pizza. We walked into Zadar and looked for a pizza place, and couldn't find one, so Hrvoje asked some teenage boys walking by if there was one. They tried to explain, but it turned out to be too difficult, so they just led us there instead. We sat down and ordered. I didn't really want pizza, so I ordered something else (forgot what). I remember Ivan ordered spaghetti, and Hrvoje got his pizza with anchovies on it. Kelle HATES fish, and refused to kiss Hrvoje until he brushed his teeth. We sat at the restaurant for a while, I finished my caj (ch-eye) [tea], and we left.

Walking to the train station, we stopped off for Kelle to go to the bathroom, and to pick up a nibble of food for the trip. We arrived at the kolodvor at about 7:30pm, and the train didn't leave until 9:45pm, if I recall correctly. I remember that there are NO chairs in the station itself, but there were two sets of hard, plasti-chairs outside by the trains. I was tired, so I laid down with my head on Ivan's lap and tried to sleep, but again, my legs and hips kept going numb. *sigh* I eventually gave up and it was cold, so we walked around for a bit. There was no heat on inside the station, either, so we just kinda moved around to keep warm. Eventually, ECONOtrain pulled up and we made our slow, 40mph way to Knin in the darkness.

We arrived in Knin and got off the train at around midnight. It was really cold, and drizzling. We waited about 15 or 20 minutes for the train to come, and boarded it for Zagreb. It was FULL. As we opened compartment doors, we noticed that the seats converted into little bed type things to sleep on. Wish we would have known that on the way down! There were no empty compartments, so We ended up splitting up into pairs. Hrvoje and Kelle got a compartment with only 1 person in it, and were able to convert the seats into the beds. Ivan and I managed to find a compartment with 3 people in it, which means we couldn't convert the seats, and there was little room to get comfy without getting more friendly than is polite with strangers. We put our things on the rack and Ivan went to sleep. I swear, I don't know how he does it. I moved over to the side of the compartment and rested my feet on the armrest next to this older lady, and tried to sleep, and maybe got an hour the whole way to Zagreb. We showed up in Zagreb at like 5am, and went back to the house to crash.

[OnyxCougar]

Day Nine (Monday)


This is the point things start getting jumbled up for me, so hopefully Kelle and Hrvoje have a better recollection of what happened which day. It was very cold outside. We did alot of staying in the house and watching TV or listening to music, and drinking coke (Kelle) and hot tea and hot chocolate. Ivan's Aunt has cancer, and we found out his cousin was bringing her home Tuesday, so we were going to have to stay in the lair. We started cleaning up and doing laundry. Now....a note about the laundry there. They don't believe in dryers, apperantly. So after you wash the clothes, as in England, you hang them out to dry. The catch is that it was raining and the clothes line was NOT covered. So since hanging clothes up in the rain was not conducive to taking clean, DRY clothes home, I hung them over doors, in front of radiators, on hangers in the closet...anyplace I could find. It made it humid and kinda musty in the house on Monday night.


The four of us finally went to the movies. Now, the theatres there look like ours, and smell like ours, and the prices for popcorn and stuff are hella expensive like ours, but there are subtle differences, like "balcony seating". To Americans, balcony seating is the way the chairs are tiered in the theater, much like "stadium seating". In this particular theatre, "balcony seating" meant you walk upstairs to the balcony and watch the movie from up on high. Also, the movies are in the original english, with Croatian subtitles. I'd love to watch a movie like "the Lion King", or another one I know by heart, and take a pen and paper, and write down the subtitles. I could learn the language SO FAST that way. We decided to take in a double feature: Lilo and Stitch followed by Signs.

Lilo and Stitch was good, but I don't think it was up to the same standard as even Atlantis was. Definetly not one of their better films. We walked out of the balcony through a side door, and Kelle wanted to call home to make sure everything was ok. It was, so we went back into the theatre and Signs. Now, I knew Signs was by M. Night Shamalayan, but I didn't really know what it was about. And OH MAN it was good! Justin had already seen it with his (now ex-) girlfriend, Danielle, and said it was fantastic, but this is the same child who thinks Robert Guillame and Denzel Washington are the same person. I would describe it as a suspense/drama, but Ivan calls it a "horror movie" and I really think had I not been there, he would have gotten up and left. He stayed, though, and admits it was incredibly good, just scary. I honestly didn't know it was scary like that.

[OnyxCougar]

Day Ten (Tuesday)

The first thing we did was half pack up our stuff, get everything together, and put it out in the lair. Then we cleaned Ivan's cousin's house, changed the sheets on all the beds, and then Hrvoje was sent into the lair on a seek-and-destroy mission to kill all the spiders. Ivan wasn't very happy about that, he contended the spiders kept the bugs away, but Kelle didn't care. So all the spiders got kilt. Even spider mummies had to go.


The lair is basically 3 rooms. Kelle and Hrvoje took the kitchen, Ivan and I the bunk bed in the main room. Once we got everything to livable, I made sure my still wet clothes were hanging on the heater and we went out to the Trg to look around.

We went to Subway, as in the sandwich place, just off the Trg, next to Hotel Dubrovnik. If I ever go to Zagreb again and wanna stay in a hotel, I'm stayin there. It's in the middle of EVERYTHING. And there was a subway there. So we went. And it was sooooo good. So good. Kelle had (what else) roast BEEF! and I got a large something warm. It was the most food I ate at once my entire stay there. I was an oinker. I had a hot chocolate and we walked out from the Subway, you nearly had to roll me. I can't tell you how familiar and wonderful it tasted.

We walked around Zagreb and went shopping for the kids and such. Didn't find anything, but we saw more shops, and I picked up a pad of stationery with a croatian cartoon figure on it. Funny...it's in English.... Ivan had forgotten to leave the key to the house under the mat for his Aunt and cousin, and we still had more lookie-looing to do, so he took the tram back to the house while we made our slow, wending way to Tolkien's. We were to meet in an hour there for some hot chocolate.


On the way over, we took the funicular (like a tram that goes WAY uphill) instead of the stairs this time, it was like 3 kuna each. At the top of the hill in Kaptol (where Tolkien's and St. Mark's church is) there is Lotrscak Tower. It has a little gift shop in there, and we bought some postcards, and saw a really great book on Zagreb in there that we wanted to buy, but it was like 350 kunas, and the money was starting to run low. We wrote the title of the book down, and decided to send some money to Ivan when we got home, so he could buy it and mail it to us. We walked out of the tower and down the street, past St. Mark's Church, and into Tolkien's. Ivan wasn't there yet, so we got the back table and ordered for him. Bryan Adams was playing on the juke, and I looked around at all the memorabilia from Lord of the Rings, and looked through the postcards and the one book on Zagreb that me and Kelle bought. Not long after, Ivan arrived. He had gotten to Tolkien's while we were in the Tower, and had gone back downstairs to wait for us. When we didn't show, he went back upstairs and here he was.

We were all rather subdued, it was our last night in Zagreb. We considered going out to a club, but it was DAMN cold, and Kelle and I didn't really feel like going back to the lair, getting all done up, putting skirts on, and walking to the tram in heels and riding the tram to a club and walking to the club, dancing, and going back to the lair, all in about 30 degree weather. No, that's ok, I'll take the zero. So we talked for awhile, and left. I took one last look around and left Tolkien's in body, but I think part of me is still in there, sipping hot chocolate in the corner booth.

On the way back to the lair, we got to the Tower and looked out over Zagreb. This was my last look. I took some pictures from the wall, and we got a few of us together.

[OnyxCougar]

Me, Kelle, Hrvoje

[OnyxCougar]

Day Eleven (Wednesday)


The mood was pretty somber all day as we prepared our hearts and our bags to leave. The clothes we had washed 2 days before still weren't dry and hanging them over the radiators overnight had only dried one side of them, so we flipped them over and basically moped around the lair. Kelle and Hrvoje really had no privacy, so about 4pm, when it was dark, (and FREEZING cold) Ivan and I went to a little cafe down the street from Volovcica Trg and had some hot chocolate. It wasn't as good as Tolkien's, but it was warm, and we got a window table, and we talked about him coming to the States and future plans and the possibility of opening a business, like Tolkien's. We talked for hours. Finally, with time pressing us on, we went back to the Lair and packed the rest of our things.

For some reason I fell asleep for a few hours, and Ivan woke me up at 9:30pm. 'You haff an hour,' he said, and I got up and rechecked over the things I'd be taking on the plane. I left my pillow with him, and a few odds and ends that I thought would be better off in his hands. Kelle and I were alternately crying and the guys were just quiet, for the most part. At 10:15pm, we left the lair and entered the cold night. Tiny snowflakes fell as we crossed the street to the Borongaj tram station. Took the tram from Borongaj to Glasni Kolodvor and we figured out that Hrvoje had bought Kelle a one-way on the bus from Vienna, whereas Ivan had got me the round trip. So we needed the remainder of the money for Kelle's bus ticket to Vienna. Ivan covered it. So on the bus we went, after final hugs and lots of tears on all sides.

We rode through the night, crying almost all the way to Slovenia. We had to actually get out of the bus at the Austrian/Slovenia border, where they ran our passports through a little machine and then we got back on the bus.

[OnyxCougar]

Day Twelve (Thursday) November 6, 2002


Dawn broke over the Austrian landscape as we pulled into Vienna, and we were back at the damned Sudbahnhof. This time, since we had learned the damn thing, we went right to the buses to the Flughafen (airport) and bought our tickets. We arrived at the airport hella early, and Kelle changed in the bathroom as I guarded the bags outside it. We picked up some Vienna postcards in the shop and made our way to the ticket line to check in. Waited about 45 minutes and checked the bags through to JFK. We were told they couldn't check them through because of US Customs restrictions, but we could recheck them right outside customs through to our final destination. We shrugged. No problem.

We went up to our gate. It was pretty crowded, so I found a little nook behind this big potted plant, and we sat there for about 30 minutes or so as I gave up on my right hand middle finger fiberglass nail, which had been a thorn in my ass since McCarran. We boarded the plane, halfheartedy making jokes about "hey, turn this thing around, I wanna go back to Zagreb!" Sighing, we settled in for the trip to JFK. I slept for a little bit, not much, maybe 45 minutes over the whole flight. The movie was K19 : Widowmaker, with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. Really excellent movie. And we had the BEEF!

We landed in New York at about 3:30pm with our little green cards all filled out and all of our bags made it. Our next flight was to leave at 6:20pm on National Airlines, directly to Las Vegas. We went through customs without a problem and right around the corner, as you go out, there was an Austrian Airlines "continued journey baggage check" counter with two women at it in the Austrian Red Livery that we had come to know and despise. The younger woman, we'll call her Helga, had dark hair and tried not to look completely confused at her very existance. "Verr are yoo goink?" she asked. "Las Vegas," Kelle replied, getting into the swing of this travelling thing. Helga tapped on the keyboard for a few moments. "Do you have your tickets?" she asked. We dutifully pulled out our last little ticket on the stub. She took them and perused it like Johnny Bench waiting for a pitch. The older woman, Hildegaard, craned her wrinkled old neck to the right and looked at the ticket. Immediately she pointed to the flight number. "National," she murmered. "N.A." Helga squinted up at the monitor and back down at the ticket. "It's not here," Helga muttered. Hilde now squinted up at the monitor. It was scary.

"Las Wegas?" she asked. We nodded. I gave her the flight number. Hilde moved young Helga over, almost booty bumped her, and took over. Tappity-tappity. "hmm." Tappity-tap-tap-tappity. Finally, she shrugged. "OK," she said. Baggage tags printed out, they attached them to the bags, we got our tickets back, and we were on our way from terminal 1 to terminal 4. *sigh*

Got to term4 and went upstairs, now very confident where we were going, after all, we had to look for information on the way out of the country. We got upstairs and looked around for the National counter. "That's wierd. Didn't we come in at Terminal 4?" I asked. "Yeah," Kelle said, chewing her gum. I looked around and decided to ask some of the xray techs over by the Northwest counter.

"Excuse me," I said, interrupting a very interesting conversation about football with a perfectly reasonable question, "Where is the National Counter?" They stopped and a tall black man actually laughed. "The what?" he said, rather impishly. If he didn't hear me why did he laugh? "The National Airlines counter," I repeated, more precisely. Perhaps he thought I meant the National Car Rental place downstairs or something. A young mexican looked Kelle up and down. "Nachonal went out of beesness las' nite." Now it was our turn to laugh. "No, guys, really. Where is the National counter?" The older black guy said, "No, really. They went bankrupt at midnight last night. All their flights have been cancelled." My heart sunk in my chest. No...no no no no dammit no. "What are the ticketed passengers supposed to do?" They shrugged in unison. "Some of the airlines are trying to pick up the slack and take people on standby. May want to try them," he offered, pointing at Northwest.

We looked around in a daze. Here we were, in New York's largest airport, ticketed through to Las Vegas on an airline that no longer existed. I strode up to the counter. "I'm ticketed on National to Las Vegas. Can you help me?" This poor woman was probably just as unhappy National went out of business as I was. Her hair must have been nicely coifed at one point, but had fallen, and it was gonna take hydraulics to get it back up. She was frazzled. She looked at her screen. "I have a standby to Minneapolis and Detroit in a couple hours, no guarantee you'll get a standby out of there for Vegas, though." My heart sank. "OK," I decided. "Let's go see if any other airlines can get us home." Then a thought struck me. Where the hell was our luggage that we checked in at Austrian? Going downstairs from the airline counters, Kelle was pissed, talking about "Oh, sure, good old USA! We should have stayed in Croatia! They don't lose luggage! They don't have bankrupt airlines stranding passengers! Yeah, SOOO good to be home!" *stomp stomp stomp*

We got downstairs and went to the not-so-much-information booth, but the slugbrain blonde wasn't on duty, we got fried-chicken eating, down home, big black beautiful woman at the desk, chewing her gum and staring at us like we were the ones that brought her great-great-grandparents over on the slave ship.

"Ken ah HELP ya'll?" *smack smack*

"Um, yes, we heard that National Airlines is out of business and..."

"UM..*smack* yeah yeah yeah, UM...theyah is a FLYah heyah that I can give youz about dat. *smack*" (Searches around the desk and spies a LARGE stack of paper. Recognizing it as what she has been searching for, she hands me one.) "Yeah, heeya it is." I look at it. It says National is out of business and according to FAA regs, other airlines are supposed to help where possible, but they can charge whatever they want. I knew this.

"OK," I decide to try and ask my question again. "But I need to know about...."

"UM *smack smack* yeah, UM... You'll have to cahntact de othah aiyalines for assistance wit getting a flight to yoawah final destinayshun." I blinked for a few moments, wondering if I was speaking the same language as this bitch and wondering if I could fuck her up and get out of the terminal before security got to me. I took a deep breath and tried again.

"I understand that. That isn't what I'm asking you. What I want.."

*smack smack* She had the nerve to act like she was forcibly being patient with me. "So what ah you axin me?" I'm thinking, 'maybe I could get in 2 good sucker punches to that big fat mouth of yours before anyone would notice.'

"Austrian Airlines checked our baggage in at customs, destined for Las Vegas on a National flight, which no longer exists. How do I get my bags back?"

Moo-cow blinked for a minute. "You would hafta coawall Ahstrian Aiyah." She ACTUALLY looked at her fingernails and picked at her cuticle then looked up at me calmly, like, 'anything else?' I pressed my lips together, and figured I prolly couldn't make it out the emergency doors before big black security guard got ahold of me.

"Thank you," I managed. "Shoowah," she fake smiled.

About 30 feet away was a bank of phones. I got on one. Called Austrian Air customer service, who couldn't get ahold of the lost and found for the Airline. "You'll have to go down there," she said. I sighed. Here we are at Terminal 4, and we have to go around this damn airport AGAIN to Terminal One. Well, it wasn't like we had a flight to catch. Back on the bus.

So now we're back on the bus and we go around the airport. Again. We get out at Terminal 1 and ask a security guard for directions to the Austrian Airlines lost and found and he points us to the big "LUFTHANSA" sign. Ah.

We trudged into the Lufthansa/Austrian lost and found. There was an older lady, and a younger guy in there. The guy was on the phone, so the older lady helped us. It took HER an hour to call, get ahold of, and get information from the right people. Turns out our bags were put out on the tarmac. She went and got them, and brought them to us, and you never saw two people so happy to have thier stuff back as us. The nice lady tried to get us flight information to get home. "I don't know if you will find anything, dears, it's Veteran's Day Weekend, you know." I looked at Kelle. Oh shit. It never even crossed our minds. She endorsed our Vegas tickets. "That should help," she said, "this stamp means that Austrian will pay for your ticket to Vegas." We almost cried. "Thanks so much!" "Good luck!" she called as we left with 4 huge bags, one of them falling apart so much that we had to tape it closed, 2 backpacks, jackets, Kelle's pillow, and one very thin piece of paper each that served as our way home, if we could find a seat.

We went to all the counters, stood in all the lines, and after 3 hours it was 8pm. We were tired, hungry, thirsty, scared, stranded and pissed. I left the Delta counter, crying. They all wanted $125 each for each leg of the trip, everything was standby if there was anything at all, and at best, we'd be leaving out of New York at 8am the next morning. They didn't seem to give a shit about Austrian's endorsement. I looked at the bank of phones and called Miah and Sindy, who were staying with the kids. I explained the situation, and they looked on all the websites. There was nothing available, even for full purchase price, out of New York's JFK, LaGuardia, or Newark airports. I sighed and told them we'd be home as soon as we could.

[OnyxCougar]

I tried to pull myself together to think. Kelle went outside to smoke and I did the only thing a girl who is stranded in a big old nasty airport 3500 miles from home: I called my daddy.

I started out cool. "Hi Daddy."
"Hi! What's up?"
"Well, you know we went to Europe, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, we got to JFK airport, and found out National went bankrupt."
"Yeah, I heard about that."
This is where my voice started going up in octaves. "Well we're at JFK and there are no flights out to Las Vegas and everything is standby and you can'tevenbuyyourwayoutofthis airport...." I was crying and slurring everything together.

Daddy has never liked trying to talk to me when I'm crying. "OK, calm down, I can't understand you. You're at JFK?"
[sniff, snuffle] "Yeah."
"And you were ticketed home to Vegas on National?"
"Yeah."
"And now National is out of business. Have you checked with the other airlines?"
"Yes. We can't find anything out of New York. We might be able to get standbys to Minneapolis or Detroit on Northwest, or Atlanta, Dallas or Salt Lake on Delta, but after that it's anyone's guess as to what is going to be available to Vegas, and that will be standby too."
"Well, let's get you as far west as possible. See what you can get to Salt Lake and then call me back."
"Ok Daddy."

Kelle came in from smoking her cigarette and I told her Daddy said to get to Salt Lake. So we went back upstairs to the Delta counter, and the last plane of the night to SLC was no longer taking standby requests. The last Atlanta flight wasn't taking requests. The last Dallas flight was full up too. There was now NOTHING we could do. We were stuck in New York for the night.

"Daddy?"
"What did you find out?"
"All the planes are fullandnowwe'restuckinNewYork.."
[sigh]"Ok, calm down. What did delta say?"
"All the planes leaving the airport, on all the airlines, are full. No standby available."
"Ok, when is the first flight to Salt Lake?"
"8am tomorrow morning, and that's on a standby basis."
"ok, what time is it there?"
"It's 10pm."
"Ok, you have 2 choices: take a taxi and get a hotel room for the night, or sleep in the airport. You have any money?"
"We have a little, but we'll need it for the standby tickets. $25 each for each leg of the trip."
"Looks like you'll be staying in the airport then. Go to the Delta counter and ask when and where you can sign up for the Salt Lake standby. See if you can get a standby confirmation, and then you can go behind security, and sleep back there, where it's safer. The best thing about New York is being FROM there."
"Ok, Daddy."
"OK?"
"Ok."
"Alright, call me in the morning if you do NOT get the standby to Salt Lake, or call me from Salt Lake if you get there."
"OK."

So I called Delta. I got a "Standby Confirmation Number", which means I'm on the list to be on the list for standby. [sigh] We checked with security, and since we didn't actually have a ticket or "standby ticket", we couldn't go behind the checkpoint. And better news: Delta has it's own terminal. Terminal Three. So back on the bus with all our shit at 10:30 at night in New York. And we were at terminal four. All the way around the friggin airport. Again. I tell you, we were so tired of this damn airport we could just ..something. Damn tired.

So we got to Terminal three, but it was so late that most of it was closed. The only part of it that was open was a side door, and there was one lady at the counter, who confirmed my SCN (Standby Confirmation Number), and said we could sleep over there (pointing to a set of chairs in the corner). I asked her the earliest time we could actually get the standby tickets, and she said 6:30am. So we took out little luggage cart and parked it next to the chairs. Kelle got her blanket out and laid it on the floor, threw her pillow on top of it and then borrowed my blanket to cover herself with. She kind of slid her short self underneath the seats I was sitting on and fell asleep. I sat on the outside chair and stretched my arm over our bags, then laid my head on my arm as a pillow. I might have gotten 2 hours sleep total, but every time one of the cleaning ladies walked past the automatic doors, I'd wake up as the icy outside air blew over us. I hate New York.

[OnyxCougar]

Day Thirteen (Friday) November 7, 2002


At about 5:30am a group of freshly rested people came into the terminal and Kelle and I both woke up. She was stiff and sore from laying on the floor, and I was stiff and sore from leaning over all our stuff in an attempt to make sure it wouldn't get stolen. We got up and took turns fixing ourselves up in the bathroom, then made our way to the counter. Delta took our endorsed Austrian tickets to Vegas and put us on Standby for Salt Lake. We went past security and looked down at the fluffy carpet and the McDonalds. This would have been way better to sleep on.

Got to the gate, and quickly caught on to how standby works. They have a number of unsold seats. That is the starting number of standby tickets they will issue. Since the agent on the phone saw there was still 12 seats unsold on this flight, he was able to issue 12 SCNs (2 to us). Now. The people with the SCNs for this flight were pretty much guaranteed a seat. Now here's the true standby part. Any cancellation seats are totaled up the hour before, and more SCNs are issued. Now in the last 10 minutes prior to boarding, anyone who hasn't checked in yet pretty much loses their seat, and then all the people on the list get em. We knew as soon as we sat down at the gate our seats were ours. I finally relaxed. Once we got to SLC, I knew southwest air ran like every other hour. We were as good as home. Kelle and I talked about getting standby's once we got to SLC and I said, "hey, worse comes to worst, we'll DRIVE home. It's only about 6 hours. I WILL sleep in my own bed tonight."

We arrived in Salt Lake, and so did all our luggage. We went to baggage claim and grabbed everything, and I called Daddy to let him know we were here. He said to go check on the standby for Vegas at the Delta counter and give him a call when we knew something. So we went to the Delta counter. "Hi. We're National Refugees, and Were ticketed from JFK to Vegas. We got the standby from JFK to here, and need to now get our last leg to Vegas." The young clerk smiled. "Certainly. May I have your tickets, please?" I looked at Kelle. "They took our tickets at the Delta counter in New York when they put us on the flight here. They were endorsed my Austrian air." She blinked at me. "Here is our tickets from New York to here. See there? Standby." She looked at them. "These don't show you're ticketed through to Vegas." "Well, we were originally ticketed from JFK to Vegas on National, but since they went bankrupt, Austrian Air endorsed the tickets, and we gave them to the Delta people in New York, to get us home. They said we had to get standby into Vegas from here." She sighed and shook her head. "Well, they only ticketed you to here. You'll have to buy tickets from here to Vegas."

I sighed. "Ok, how much are two one ways from here to Vegas?" She did some typing. "$153 each." I looked at Kelle. "We don't have that kind of money. Is that the standby price?" The lady nodded. Looks like we're driving home. I mean, $35 + gas for a one day car rental was alot better than $300 + tax. So we got out of line and I started calling car rental places. Well, all I had was a debit card. Not a credit card. Just FYI, car rental companies will NOT rent to you if all you have is a debit card. You can have a million dollars on a debit car, but they won't rent to you. Not even if you put $200 cash on the counter. I called every car rental company in Salt Lake City. Nothing.

"Daddy?"
"What you got?" he said, confidently.
"A bunch of nothin." I explained the whole Delta thing and the whole car thing.
"ok, you're at the airport now?"
"Yeah."
"You're at a pay phone?"
"Yeah."
"ok, give me your phone number there." I did. "Ok, stay where you are, camp on that phone, and I'll call you back in 30 minutes.
"ok Daddy."

Thirty minutes later he called back. "You have a pen?"
"yeah."
"ok, write this down." He gave me some digits. "Take that number to the Southwest counter right now. Run to the counter. Your flight leaves in 45 minutes." I squealed and relayed the information to Kelle. She squealed and we hugged each other. I hung up the phone and we literally ran to the southwest counter. I gave them the confirmation number and we checked in. Surprise! Our bags, being international, were "randomly selected" for full search. We had to give them our keys, and they unlocked everything, unpacked everything, then tried to repack everything and were having a hard time. Minutes were ticking by and we were required to stand there, but we couldn't help repack. They simply couldn't stuff all that shit into the bags that we had been schlepping around the planet. They had to call someone over to make everything fit. Finally, they got it all zipped up, locked up, handed out keys back, and checked our bags through. We went past security as quickly as possible, and got to the gate after almost everyone had boarded. Got to the ticket guy on the ramp, and had to take our shoes off. Shoes came off, fanny packs and backpacks were completely gone through and we ran up the jetway.

It was a pleasant flight home, we were exhausted and smelled, but we were nearly there. We landed in Vegas 50 minutes later and I nearly bent to my knees and kissed McCarren. We called Sindy, she came and picked us up. Got home, called Daddy, thanked him again, got in the shower, and went to bed. We were home.

The End

[glatt]

Good travel diary! The ordeal at the end was unreal.