Stranded
So what was meant to be a 7-day transatlantic jaunt has turned into a Kerouac-style 11-day epic, thanks to a volcano with a name so implausibly short on vowels I find it hard to acknowledge its existence. Anyway, because of said volcano (which I think starts with an E, so I'm going to call it Eric) I've seen rather more of the US than I cared to, including such centres of cutting edge, urban civilisation as Hartford, Connecticut...
... and Wilmington, Delaware...
...not to mention some random, seemingly nameless swathes of industry:
Slightly more interestingly, we whipped past Philadephia, famous for its soft cheese and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air:
... all accompanied by an unintentional but appropriate soundtrack of Eels, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, REM and Emmylou Harris. And if all the above isn't enough to whet your appetite and send you running towards the next Greyhound bus I don't know what is.
And it strikes me that this is one of the almost incomprehensible things about America as far as us Brits are concerned - it's so flippin' huge. Stranded in Washington D.C. with a promise of a flight a whole 12 days after ours was meant toleave (and a sound ticking off from Rachel at Virgin, who told us that there were hundreds of thousands of other people for whom they'd summarily failed to make adequate arrangements once airspace had reopened, and frankly we should ve grateful) we faced the prospect of 2 weeks in a motel in the arse-end of a city we'd already seen, or a trip to somewhere new entirely. The hotel receptionist, for reasons best known to himself, seemed adamant that his stranded guests should up sticks to Baltimore, and his insistence on the subject was so bordering on sinister that I think it's put me off ever venturing there. As we gathered - my other half and I, a stranded holidaying Dutchman and four geographers from Belfast who'd been in Washington on a conference - in the hotel loby bemoaning our lack of funds in this expensive city, he would cut in at random intervals with a sort of petulant drawl: "Go to Baltimore. Got to hostels.com. Take the megabus to Baltimore and go take a bottle of whiskey and sit by Edgar Allen Poe's grave."
Tempting though this might have been, we were eventually drawn to Boston, "nearby" by US standards and somehwere that warranted exploring. It would mean covering less than half the East coast at a cost of a few dollars each, and we'd see states we'd never see again (mainly because there isn't anything to see.) Boston was, in relative terms, not too far away, and would allow us to fly from Newark, New York or Logan with relative ease once Iceland's little shot at an apocalypse subsided. So we booked a bus and pootled off to Massachusetts with remarkable ease and no sense of urgency on the part of us or indeed the driver. 442 miles and 9 hours later, there we were - a journey about 1 and a half times the distance from London to Newcastle. Of the many little flurries of excitement we passed along the way was the welcome sign to Connecticut, which read "Welcome to Connecticut - we're full of surprises" (they lied - I was not surprised by anything during my brief visit) and a huge billboard declaring "When you die you will meet God," with an accompanying picture showing a heart monitor flatlining. I'm still not quite sure what to make of this, or indeed what the point of it was. More amusingly perhaps, not to say rubbing it in, was the following advertisement for Logan airport:
This is more than a little ironic, not to say rubbing our noses in our predicament somewhat.
But not as much of this. As we put our heads together in that lobby trying to devise an escape plan, punctuated by an ocasional outburst of "You could go to Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe's buried there. You can take a bus" a woman of indiscriminate Northern European origin walked past dragging a huge suitcase.
"Well, I am lucky, I am going home" she announced in matter-of-fact, clipped tones, as I tried to figure out if she was maybe Swedish, Danish or Dutch.
"Really? You've managed to get a flight? Where are you from?"
"Iceland."
A cold silence hit that room with a blast louder than any erruption Eyjafjallajökul could muster. Frankly I'm surprised she got out of there alive.
... and Wilmington, Delaware...
...not to mention some random, seemingly nameless swathes of industry:
Slightly more interestingly, we whipped past Philadephia, famous for its soft cheese and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air:
... all accompanied by an unintentional but appropriate soundtrack of Eels, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, REM and Emmylou Harris. And if all the above isn't enough to whet your appetite and send you running towards the next Greyhound bus I don't know what is.
And it strikes me that this is one of the almost incomprehensible things about America as far as us Brits are concerned - it's so flippin' huge. Stranded in Washington D.C. with a promise of a flight a whole 12 days after ours was meant toleave (and a sound ticking off from Rachel at Virgin, who told us that there were hundreds of thousands of other people for whom they'd summarily failed to make adequate arrangements once airspace had reopened, and frankly we should ve grateful) we faced the prospect of 2 weeks in a motel in the arse-end of a city we'd already seen, or a trip to somewhere new entirely. The hotel receptionist, for reasons best known to himself, seemed adamant that his stranded guests should up sticks to Baltimore, and his insistence on the subject was so bordering on sinister that I think it's put me off ever venturing there. As we gathered - my other half and I, a stranded holidaying Dutchman and four geographers from Belfast who'd been in Washington on a conference - in the hotel loby bemoaning our lack of funds in this expensive city, he would cut in at random intervals with a sort of petulant drawl: "Go to Baltimore. Got to hostels.com. Take the megabus to Baltimore and go take a bottle of whiskey and sit by Edgar Allen Poe's grave."
Tempting though this might have been, we were eventually drawn to Boston, "nearby" by US standards and somehwere that warranted exploring. It would mean covering less than half the East coast at a cost of a few dollars each, and we'd see states we'd never see again (mainly because there isn't anything to see.) Boston was, in relative terms, not too far away, and would allow us to fly from Newark, New York or Logan with relative ease once Iceland's little shot at an apocalypse subsided. So we booked a bus and pootled off to Massachusetts with remarkable ease and no sense of urgency on the part of us or indeed the driver. 442 miles and 9 hours later, there we were - a journey about 1 and a half times the distance from London to Newcastle. Of the many little flurries of excitement we passed along the way was the welcome sign to Connecticut, which read "Welcome to Connecticut - we're full of surprises" (they lied - I was not surprised by anything during my brief visit) and a huge billboard declaring "When you die you will meet God," with an accompanying picture showing a heart monitor flatlining. I'm still not quite sure what to make of this, or indeed what the point of it was. More amusingly perhaps, not to say rubbing it in, was the following advertisement for Logan airport:
This is more than a little ironic, not to say rubbing our noses in our predicament somewhat.But not as much of this. As we put our heads together in that lobby trying to devise an escape plan, punctuated by an ocasional outburst of "You could go to Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe's buried there. You can take a bus" a woman of indiscriminate Northern European origin walked past dragging a huge suitcase.
"Well, I am lucky, I am going home" she announced in matter-of-fact, clipped tones, as I tried to figure out if she was maybe Swedish, Danish or Dutch.
"Really? You've managed to get a flight? Where are you from?"
"Iceland."
A cold silence hit that room with a blast louder than any erruption Eyjafjallajökul could muster. Frankly I'm surprised she got out of there alive.
Labels: Travel
posted by RLS at 7:30 pm
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