As soon as I made it through immigration, I bought another ticket to take a regional flight down to Placenia, a sleepy beach town about 90 air-miles south of Belize City.
Turns out she was working as an assoc. producer of his new off-Broadway show and invited Meredith and I to come see it! So frigging awesome! Thanks again, Gina!
We were taking the overnight sleeper train down to Surat Thani, and then from Surat Thani, we'd be taking a bus to a small village that was right on the outskirts of Khao Sok, one of Thailand's famous rain forest National Parks!
Everything was going smoothly until we tried to check in and the woman at the ticket counter had no record of us in the computer. I gave her the confirmation number for our flights and she nodded, "Oh, here you are! You weren't coming up because your flight LEFT YESTERDAY!" That's when I realized that in all my efforts to coordinate our arrival date in Dubai with Bernadette, I'd somehow mixed up what day our flight left NYC. "Hi, I'm an idiot!"
The woman at the ticket counter told us she'd "See what she could do." And then we spent the next 20 minutes in nail-biting agony trying not to freak the fuck out while she pecked away at her keyboard in silence. If she couldn't get us on a flight that day, we didn't even have a place to stay in NYC because we'd sublet our apartment! Arrrgh!
Thankfully, a couple minutes later, the ticket-lady suddenly exclaimed "Done! You're all set!" and handed us our boarding passes!
NYC-Frankfurt for the first leg of the trip. I'm sitting here typing these captions on 2/26/06 (over a year after the trip happened) so I'm referring to a little travel notebook I took with me to help job my memory. The only thing I have written about this flight is "Sat next to a heavy German man on the flight out of NYC who reeked so badly of strong cologne that interior of my nose felt like burning."
...a $150 dollar ticket for making a right turn ON GREEN during business hours. WHAT THE FUCK? Apparently, they've recently instituted these "no right turn" rules as a way to generate revenue for the broke-ass NYPD. (I tried to plead to the cop that the hot dog vendor's umbrella had obstructed the sign, which it in fact did, but he didn't want to hear it.). The day was off to a shitty start until Meredith instantly lifted the clouds by changing out of her work clothes on the highway and giving me a...
Eveything was running on schedule right up to the last leg of our trip to the airport when we realized that the Belt Parkway was closed. We ended up having to take some crazy ass detour and as a result we didn't arrive in time for our flight's check in. I showed up at the gate and the woman at the counter starts shaking her head and goes "Uh-uh." I was like "What do you mean 'Uh-uh'?"...then I had a heart attack. It turns out there was another flight and she hooked us up. Here's us with our newly issued tix.
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