And Back Again

Like any travelogue, you have to cover the trip home. It’s been busy for me since we unloaded ourselves at the Newark Liberty airport last month, and I’ve been reluctant to finish, with this last blog. I didn’t want it to be over.

I finished the Tour de Tahoe in 5 hours and 48 minutes, showered and headed back to the finish line to greet the rest of the folks as they came in.

Then, some of us headed over to the hotel next door where the “pool party” was in full death spiral. When you claim to have a party, here’s a tip – a cash bar is a bit of a faux pas. They had some pasta (I haven’t touched so much as a noodle since I got back) and a few other things. The hot tub was stuffed with revelers, and a few looked like they came straight from the ride. I didn’t envy the guy that was going to have to scrape off the ring of sweat and road grit on that tub later.

The pool by this hour was out of the sun and the water was quite cool, and a few degrees away from being comfortable. This didn’t deter a hardy few of us. We spied GPS Eric and Peter the triathlate lounging poolside, sharing an oh so quiet moment. I violated the silence by shouting over to them “WHY CAN’T I QUIT YOU?” It got a good laugh.

Later, we all shlepped over to the “Victory Party” hosted by who could possibly be the Guinness World Record holder for the worst DJ ever. I believe that they have cloned this guy and ship him out to every Junior High dance, wedding and Bar Mitzvah around the country. His CD collection stopped abruptly somewhere around 1982. Despite his efforts, people still managed to find a way to dance to his sonic torture, and I mean dance in an Elaine Benis from Seinfeld kind of way.

The trip home, sadly, went about as well as trip out there. And if any one wants to know about the Catholic concept of Pergatory, it exists in the Denver International Airport. We were stuck there for five hours. Five. You run out of things to do and look at after about 45 minutes, and every terminal is nearly exactly the same, like that episode of The Twilight Zone where Will Shatner keeps getting off the train in the same place, over and over and over again.

We grabbed lunch at one of the many pseudo brew pubs that festoon airports nowadays. I think the name had the word “red” in it somewhere. What was the most memorable was that no matter what you ordered foodwise, you could tell it had been prepared long in advance and had likely been resting quietly in a fridge until it could be microwaved to death, removing every iota of flavor, and then served. In hindsight, we all should have done our best to fill up on beer to soften the pain from the slow and crushing boredom that was setting upon us.

We chatted up one of the locals, and nearly had ourselves invited over for soda and board games, but we couldn’t close the deal. Our mark’s house was just too far from the airport, apparently.

After we saw all the “sights” that the Denver airport can offer, we found ourselves dozing off one by one on some couches tucked under several palm trees in one of the many identical concourses.

Eventually, we were off again from Denver. And low and behold, they showed the same movie again, in case we missed any artistic nuances of the director of “Failure to Launch” the first two times we watched it on the way out there. We were a quieter, more sullen bunch on this leg of the trip, as many of us had left our wills to live somewhere on that bland and morosely dull concourse.

The plane’s wheels squeaked onto Newark’s airfield somewhere around 1 in the morning, Eastern time, beating the time it took us to get there by several hours – a feat that I thought would be darned near insurmountable. My thighs had become planks of oak after so many hours of being strapped down in the airplane, and I walked with the grace of some one who has had a large and equally long pole lodged in an orifice typically reserved for “exit only” traffic.

Our “limo” home was a yellow taxi cab that had recently had the misfortune of misplacing the rear passenger’s window. But they had seen fit to replace it with a plastic bag graced with an image of an American flag, which fluttered violently as we zipped to our home in Jersey City.

As we pushed the front door open at close to 2 am, lugging luggage bags with a pair of weary limbs beneath me, I was chagrined that it was all over.