Real Marriage, Sham Wedding Part 2 - The Non-Wedding Parts

Really, this is about airline travel, the wedding was only a vehicle for it (if you will).

I had to leave EARLY on Friday to get to the 7:30 am flight that I awesomely waited about 5 minutes to book (I had a seat on a 9:30 clicked, but by the time I went to pay for it, it was gone), which meant getting up at 4. I was so worried about missing it that I a) didn't fall asleep until 5 on Wednesday night and b) didn't fall asleep until about 12:30 on Thursday night. So I was a little tired when I left at 4:30. Remarkably, however, everything went smoothly - I made it to the Newark bus and onto the plane and everything, I even found a fair trade coffee place that sold bunuelos - mmm.

Then, the flight: I was seated on an aisle in the back - aisle seats scare me, but clearly, I deserved it for waiting so long to book. And I was seated next to an Orthodox family with 7 children in matching shirts. The children were pretty adorable and astonishingly well-behaved and the parents probably not much older than me - but yikes. The plane didn't seem quite full, so I offered to reshuffle if needed (I was next to three kids, their mother was seated in front of them, the father a row behind with two more, while at least one was always standing) I was seated next to their youngest - who was maybe a year old? (I can't tell baby ages, or, in this case, gender, but this one could sit, and pull itself up on the seat in front of it, but walking didn't seem like a priority) and, when I took my newspaper out, proceeded to pick up the skymall catalog and "read," clearly - I was instantly won over. As, it seemed, was the woman who was seated in the window seat next to mine - we made a couple of "wow that's a lot of kids - I guess they're cute enough, so I'm not at all annoyed but I'm glad I don't have to take care of them all day" looks and she told me in Spanish that her bag was heavy. So, then a couple in their late 30s sat down on the same row as the children's mother - with looks of abject horror. Luckily, the plane didn't seem to be full, so I went to switch places with the children's mother -thereby, at least, in theory, relieving the horrified couple of some of their misery - but they not only didn't look at me, but took some prompting to move a computer bag off of the seat that would be mine. Then the official announcement that the flight wasn't full and it was ok to move came and they didn't even wait for me to stand up to RUN for the front of the plane.

Oh well.

The flight was early, but it took an hour and a 30 second conversation about how I was assuming $14000 in liability for my rental car by not getting insurance to get the car (a Hyundai, which I was told was a 2-door but turned out to be a 4-door - yay!) - and then 45 minutes to get downtown to meet my godmother at the train station. We went to the Art Institute - which was always one of my favorite museums and has a new addition - designed by the fantastically named Renzo Piano - that really works with the old building, although it does seem to be a bit more susceptible to overheating than the old stone parts. We drove to Princeton, where she lives, an which is normally 2 hours from downtown, but, which, thanks to 3 miles of construction, took 3 hours to reach. At that point, my lack of sleep and long day started to catch up to me, and I'm still not entirely sure that I really spent a night in rural Illinois last week. . .

Saturday, getting to the airport was easy enough, except that I had to take the toll road - where tolls are either $.30 or $.80, collected every 3 miles or so, and almost all only take change. Had I known, I would have brought my change purse from home, but noooo. So I was a little worried, and, increasingly, annoyed with the whole thing. Then I picked up Bruns at the airport and promptly went 15 minutes - and 3 toll booths - the wrong way - before getting on the right path to the wedding. She paid, I was grateful.

From there, things were pretty smooth sailing, though I did have to wake up at 7 post-wedding- moderately painful, but there was free coffee in the lobby, and, miraculously, no tolls between where I got on the highway and the airport. The only complication: I only checked my departure gate once pre-security, and by the time I was reassembled on the other side, I wasn't entirely sure which concourse to go to. So I checked the screens conveniently placed right by security. And there was nothing about my flight, because my flight was not a United flight. Someone who worked at the airport saw me looking flustered and told me to go halfway down the next concourse to where the general screens were. So I did. Except they weren't working. So I turned around, fairly certain I needed to be in concourse B, even though it, like everything else, seemed to be entirely United. So I went to concourse B, passing a huge, modern, flatscreen version of the departure/arrival schedule: all United, yet again. Growing increasingly despondent, I walked up and down the B concourse for about 15 minutes. United and nothing else, and the information kiosk was unmanned. Just as I was about to give up, I did a quick jaunt down to the end of the concourse and found, miraculously, my gate. Except that there was no way I would have known that - unlike United, Continental gates didn't even have flight information on the signs in the concourse with the gate numbers on them. It would seem that, for all of the evidence that the airport's motion-sensor-activated plastic seat covers, obeying my hand motions, would provide to the contrary, if you are at O'Hare, and you aren't flying United, YOU DON'T EXIST.