The Wheezer

 I should bet money against myself: stick me in an airplane and know that I will get sick. Every single time. Layne and I have talked about this and I think we’re going to try using Covid type masks on planes. They are a dreadful pain but if I can get off a commercial airliner without getting a fever and wracking cough it would be worth it.

I need to take lessons in self portraiture obviously but before I became symptomatic Rusty was hovering more closely than usual and then as I sat up at night hacking and coughing and trying to clear my blocked sinuses I could hear him switch from deep regular breaths to long drawn out sighs. Layne had earbuds in and her back turned so so it was me and Dusty suffering through the hours of darkness, oh and then at 2am she’d appear clutching Tylenol and solicitude and a nasal spray and I’d seek relief.

In the ordinary course of things old retiree gets sick is not headline material but what has me supremely pissed off is I’ve had to conceal my flight (there it is again) to Machu Picchu. I haven’t been at 12,000 feet for a year so I am no longer acclimated to the Andes, which would be bad enough but to try to tour the ruins in my condition might actually be hazardous. We discussed it at some great length and I have to admit maybes arguments were compelling. Don’t you love those idiot manly statements “It’ll be fine” when the patient is sitting up in bed barely able to catch his breath. “A mere flesh wound…”

Team Lost is, when Layne gets the upper hand Team Commonsense as well so the cancellations have been made  and I’m still browned off about it. 

But there’s good news. Rusty’s bloodwork results came back early and when the vet called I was still able to drive and blow my nose at the same time like act good multi tasker so we drove into town.

The cool young English speaking vet at Vetrix assembled the paperwork for us including Rusty’s leishmaniasis test specific to Uruguay which is the only country to require a negative test for that mysterious disease and then we took the package ten minutes away to the secondary little airport on the waterfront of Buenos Aires where there is an agriculture office that requires no appointment, the vet said. Finding parking was hell.

Parking on the yellow is prohibited so everyone does it in a city with not enough real estate to park cars on.  Layne said action truck cane by and took the car behind us but promised not to come back till after lunch to give me time to finish the paperwork dance in the airport. Thank you Argentina.  

I had my doubts we could get it done in a day but I took my $150 worth of bet papers into the SENASA (agriculture) office where they had me fill out a form with our details. 

While they processed the form I had to go to the bank which was conveniently located next door  and pay 55,000 pesos (about $36) into SENASA’s account so the clerks don’t handle money. It’s protocol in Latin America to keep payments separate to prevent corruption. There was a line.

They were travelers changing money so the line moved fast but by the time I was back in the agriculture office Rusty’s International Veterinary Certificate was ready when I presented them with the several receipts generated by me standing in line at the bank. 

What a lot of paperwork.  Rusty got a walk way home when we stopped to pick up sausage sandwiches, Argentina’s national sandwich called choripan (chorizo and pan) for lunch.

The old dog had some walk in him in the lovely industrial zone behind the airport. 

Truck and bus drivers and warehouse workers come out for lunch at these stalls set up along the street. This is not the tourist area. On the way home there is a dude by the park who sells doughnuts and bread from his van. 

She buys his round fry bread to make bruschetta and it is really quite good. 

At this stage I’m hoping I’ll be fit to drive by Wednesday at the latest when we will get on the road back to Uruguay and a replacement Victron battery. Our mechanic in Paraguay has received our coolant parts from Rock Auto so when we show up there in a couple of weeks we’ll get a new pump thermostat crossover pipe and coolant reservoir. Which invite will seal the leaks. For now, as nothing seems to be permanent. EVs look pretty good right now.

Back In Argentina

The funniest thing about walking back up to GANNET2 Thursday afternoon was the tail wagging reaction of my wife and the utter indifference of my dog. Rusty looked up and flopped back asleep in the grass as if to say he never doubted my return, while Layne was busy unpacking her Trader Joe’s shopping list. I had a sore throat and an urgent need for tea. So ended my thirty six hour Florida shock horror drama trip. And by the way iPhone 18s are excellent with strong batteries, not too big in the hand and easy to use. I love the new facial recognition which doesn’t care if I’m wearing glasses and seems a lot less intimidating than the biometric cameras in use at border control. Knowing Palantir is storing my DNA is not a comforting thought but an easy to use iPhone…well some loss of privacy for that is okay!

My flight left Miami Wednesday night at six thirty for New York so I was bummed I didn’t have the car for my second day. I like driving and I’d have happily buzzed down to Key West for lunch and a walk but as it was I had a late check out from the Embassy Suites and a shuttle straight to the airport so that was that. The hotel was odd with its huge interior plaza and barely warm showers but it did the job and is close to the airport. Oh and it rained hard in the night too.

Miami airport is vast, spread out across miles of what seems like permanent construction zones which require much walking to negotiate. I sat in a quiet corner and wrote my last blog entry on my new phone with the bigger screen using the airport’s free WiFi and then went looking for my boarding gate. My boarding pass said Gate D11, the updated information board said D43 so I went there  and had a con leche and a Cuban sandwich at the Versailles café while I waited.

I’m reading Precipice by Robert Harris a suitably lightweight and involving novel for travel so when I got to the end of the chapter I put my Kindle away and strolled over to the gate. 

“Not here,” said the lady at the boarding gate. “We’re loading for Guatemala City here, not New York.” She looked it up and flight 2600 was leaving from gate D7. So off I walked with my carry on and my new lilac tote bag from Layne’s favorite grocery store Trader Joe’s. It’s a new product that is selling at a discount and I knew Layne would like it so I used it as my personal bag for the flight and put my camera bag inside. It actually worked quite well. It took an age but I got to D7 eventually, about thirty minutes before scheduled boarding at  the decrepit Miami airport.

There was nobody at D7, no boarding agents no plane no passengers…I couldn’t spot  any American Airline people to ask except a lady driving the golf cart used to haul handicapped passengers around so I asked her. She looked  it up on her tablet which said D7 but she looked at the empty gate and told me to wait in her cart while she went to the office. I sat in the golf cart with my carry on and trendy Trader Joe’s lilac, lined tote bag (I’m going to make it a trendy travel accessory) and waited. 

“The office says D43. It’s getting late I’ll take you there.” So off we went dodging pedestrians. She told me two drivers got fired in the last year when pedestrians walked into their golf carts. She was pissed too, pointing out how unfair that even though the investigations put the pedestrians entirely at fault still the drivers got fired. I told her Argentina is much better, no liability laws so if you do something stupid it’s on you. Her Cuban eyes flashed a glance of appreciation. Back at gate 43 I sat and waited. I overheard a man telling an elderly lady next to me her flight to New York was leaving from gate D7 so I intervened. I explained I’d just come from D7 and they said it was here. The lady spoke a little English but it turned out she was Russian and Valentina was visiting her son in New York after attending a psychology convention in Miami. The man also said the airport was locked down as there had been a shooting which might explain the confusion. He was right too.

Valentina followed me to the desk. “Definitely Gate D7” the agent told us. I asked her to call a golf cart please as we were out of time. Valentina panicked and gathered her bags to start walking. Thank goodness for Google Translate as I explained the problem one painfully slow sentence at a time. Once I had her calmed down we could wait with my glowing neon lilac Trader Joe’s tote bag. Pretty cool huh? Bet you wish you had one. 

We did eventually get on the plane after one last id check by TSA agents. I did notice a lot more ICE presence at the airport but my own experience was normal enough. The plane though looked weird smoking from the roof. The cabin crew said it was normal when plugged into airport air conditioning. Who knew?

JFK airport was shutting down when we arrived at nine o’clock at night which surprised me. No beer no barstool no nothing.  The flight out of Miami was uneventful though I was sorry to be going. 

There was a sadness I felt which must be homesickness. I was surprised but I could happily have stayed a few days…driving around on $4:50 a gallon gas. Cheaper than Argentina, half the price of gas in Uruguay. It’s all in the perspective. 

Boarding the fully loaded 777 aircraft in New York was an epic cluster fuck such as I never want to experience again. They were checking hand luggage as we entered but my carry on is soft sided and folds down when empty which is handy for a van dweller and my luminous Trader Joe’s tote bag in seductive lilac was my personal carry on so that passed muster. Inside the plane was a traffic jam such as I have never seen. The aisles were packed, cabin crew were trying to restore order, bags were being passed hand to hand to hand over passengers’ heads while others were trying to stuff oversized bags into bins in an effort to not have them checked. It was primordial, so I opened a jump seat in the boarding area and waited and forgot to take a photograph of the scrum in the aisle. This was the next morning as people woke up after eleven hours in the plane:

I’m pretty sure I’m going to hell as before I escaped the tangle of bodies I came between a Hasidic Jew in full winter  woolen Polish regalia with hat and tassels and his modest wife who looked horrified by the pressing crush of humanity  and if I say I copped a feel in that crush it was a purely involuntary act and I don’t think either of us enjoyed it as much as we might have. That I believed was the low point of the boarding process but when I was asked if I was a member of a group by a rather accusatory harassed employee and then someone asked if I was the one who had lost my bag in the tone of one seeking to blame someone else for a disaster I denied both charges, averted my eyes from the nice lady in black and found a jump seat in a quiet corner. 

“The FAA would love to see that” another, more friendly crew member smiled. I stayed put, exhausted, rules be damned. I’m an honorary Argentinian. 

Eventually I got to my seat J on the aisle side of row 38 at the very back of a full aircraft. There were only two seats and the window was occupied by a dwarf who said nothing to me the entire trip but sat like a doll with his feet sticking straight out and his head encased in headphones shutting out a cruel world. 

It could not have been a more Fellini-esque journey.

Florida

Thirty six hours in Florida, three flights, and getting a lot done is what I have been doing so far this week. As I write I am awaiting my return flight to Buenos Aires which for some reason known only to American Airlines first delivers me to distant New York where I transfer to a 12 hour overnight flight landing in Argentina on Thursday afternoon. That’s the summary of the past couple of days and the next 24 hours. Layne stayed with Rusty as a cold front swept Buenos Aires and our magical cabin heater stopped heating.

The failure of the SIM cards in both our iPhone 12 minis was the proximate cause of our sudden decision to send me, the account holder of our Verizon account, to Miami. Apparently changing the batteries in the phones prompted the connection to Verizon to be lost. The sales woman in Homestead told me we could have called Verizon (using WiFi) to have the connection re-established so next time I’ll know before I buy airline tickets. 

However after six years it was time to improve our vital communication tools so I suppose it’s no bad thing to have iPhone 18 telephones not least because the screen’s larger and my eyesight is weaker…envy those youths!

I have been flying in commercial airliners since before I can remember. I was born in England and I was baptized in Italy and my parents got divorced when I was 12 so three times a year I would fly from London to Rome and back on school vacations from Hogwarts in England where I was educated. I have no fear of flying but I hate the process especially in these fear filled days of inspections and intrusions and biometrics and suspicion and furthermore switching cultures and climates in the time it takes to travel 5,000 air miles is disorienting to me, so I suffer the process to achieve a goal. 

I prefer GANNET2’s cabin to the tube I sat in for nine hours Monday night on a Boeing 777. The ravioli dinner was gloopy and the one screeching infant did not help life aboard the fully laden aircraft as we labored north against strong headwinds. Layne had organized the car rental which got me a tall Jeep Wrangler to drive around in on Tuesday.

One of the great pleasures of GANNET2’s front wheel drive is the low floor of the Promaster van which with running boards requires no agility at all. I did Tuesday inserting a leg into the Wrangler and then hopping my right buttock up onto the seat and wiggling to get fully aboard. Stepping out absentmindedly threatened to spill me face first onto the pavement as my foot flailed in the air. 

It got the job done with strong a/c for the 90 degree humid day. It was quite the trick to pick up the car at six am in the dark, remember to lay out my Google mapping to Homestead using Hertz’s free WiFi and then not touch that phone lest I lost the route after I lost the signal. No SIM card is a curse. 

The food I miss most from the states is biscuits. Sam’s were highly reviewed but I found it not great but it got the job done with a fillet of catfish and endless coffee. Ah, America! I miss you. 

It wasn’t busy at dawn but a conversation drifted over from a nearby booth, a man with a loud voice preaching to a soul in distress which made the nostalgic homecoming complete even for an agnostic like myself. 

Best of all the diner had WiFi so I entered the highly rated Russell Verizon store at 2929 8th Street in Homestead and steered the very high ground clearance Wrangler due east on some nasty torn up asphalt worthy of Ruta 40 in Argentina. 

They opened at 9 and at 9:01 I was talking to the manager Lizbeth. I was done with two new phones, accessories and a fully functioning Verizon account less than two hours later. 

I know this is is routine but after three years of coping with the vagaries of businesses south of the border to be able to walk in and get it all done easily and efficiently was a joy. It’s also a healthy reminder that we are aliens as we drive through foreign lands. 

Up next a visit to the bank to sign some papers only now I had a working phone with full 5g capabilities. It was five years ago almost exactly when we passed the sign shown above as we set off on retirement. October 25th 2021 leaving the Keys:

When I got to First State Bank in Key Largo an enthusiastic customer was showing off her new puppy to an appreciative clerk. It’s September and this is low season and I enjoyed the pace waiting in line, not least because people who appreciate dogs can do no wrong. 

I had a honey do list from the boss so that involved Publix (Marmite) and Trader Joe’s (Taco Seasoned Beef sticks..?) on carefully laid out instructions.  We tend to think of supermarkets in Argentina Chile and Brazil as being pretty comprehensive but even a relatively modest Publix in the Keys is a thing of choice and wonder by comparison.

There is no doubt I am ready to return.  We’ve been gone a long time and I wonder if we will ever have the energy to drive back this far south again after we return to the States, so one last turn around Patagonia seems like a good idea. Brazil has some beaches we need to check out but I figure in six months or so we will be pointing due north. 

We’ve driven far and wide across the States but there’s lots more to check out and I am ready for a change of pace. Simple things such as described here have taken on the freshness of the new and believe me I noticed the comfortable smoothness of the roads even as I negotiated the sometimes heavy traffic. 

It felt good to be home and I noticed. 

We have friends and relations to visit, places to see and if we get the urge we can easily go south again. 

For now we have business to complete in South America.