Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Elly Extravaganza

I'm sitting here in a shitty beach condo in Kona waiting for my girlfriend Elly to fly in for our vacation from my vacation around the Big Island. Lovely Elly is the gal who took me on the best wine tasting of my life in Oregon and has become a dear friend in the past few months. We were both dealing with monumental breakups, bonded over too many dirty martinis (with amazing Gorgonzola stuffed olives) and have been tight ever since.

There must be some cosmic force with a healthy sense of humor who really doesn't want Elly to show up here, because I have been getting the most comical travel updates from her. Most of my conversations with Elly start with "wait til you here this..." and end with both of us relaying the latest crazy life events and lamenting that both of our worlds seem to be imploding in on themselves like collapsing black holes; they're the best kind of heart-to-hearts...you start out blue and end up laughing in that snarffly, embarrassing sort of way. The travel updates have been no different.

A week ago, Elly forwards me her flight itinerary so that I know when to pick her up at the airport. I notice that her return flight is a week later than what we had talked about on the phone, so I point it out thinking that she must have just accidentally picked the wrong return date. She contacts the airline and they want 150% more than she paid for the original ticket to change it. So we laugh and decide that she should just stay longer...win-win in my book. Then yesterday I get a voice mail from Elly as I'm on my way to pick up both her and the rental car: "Wait til you here this...there was a riot at the ticket counter and I'm on my way back to San Luis." I think that I must have heard wrong, so I call her back. Sure enough, the ticketing agents in San Francisco were taking forever to check folks in, there was line of customers all waiting to catch their international flights and things started to get agitated. Eventually someone in line chucked something or other across the ticketing counter, all hell broke loose and 200 people missed their flights, including Elly.

So she drives the 4 hours back to San Luis on the promise that she'll get on the first flight out this morning and be on the island before noon, and first class at that. Only this morning, I get another update saying that she got bumped and won't be in until tonight. Oh, and her return flight keeps mysteriously changing dates in the airline's computer system. It's doing this little pirouette...the 20th...the 27th...the 20th...the 27th. So I have no idea when she's getting here and no idea when she's leaving. All I know is that when she does arrive, we'll drink some awesome wine, tell lots of stories that start with "wait till you hear this..." and drive around the island in my shiny red rental car with the music blaring. I'll make sure to post some pictures of our adventures this week. Until then, at least I get to catch up on my blogging...

No comments:

Post a Comment