which way to bayliss's house?
5.3 miles. I had a banana beforehand but did not notice any appreciable difference in my running.
Darin has this thing about walking around strange areas, particularly at night--he loves doing it. I am a suburban white girl; I currently live in a city that isn't even a city, it's a collection of suburbs. I don't know if it's a face-your-fear kind of thing or Darin actually likes living on the edge, but it drives me crazy sometimes.
Like when we finally got into our hotel in Baltimore.
Everything I know about Baltimore I learned from Homicide, which doesn't exactly fill me with a sense of, well, inner peace. I mean, I tune in every week and watch what Our Heroes are up against, which is usually dead guys and the people who killed them.
We got a taxi at the airport and It was a little bothersome that the taxi driver had never heard of our hotel. I gave him the address and he drove us there, taking us past the new Ravens stadium and Camden Yards and some really, really charming inner city blocks. (That was sarcasm.) We checked into our hotel, which appears to be sufficient if unluxurious, and Darin wanted to go for a walk.
Say what?
He wanted to wander around a bit and see the area, maybe find a restaurant. Mind you, it's 10 at night East Coast time and we're in a strange inner city. Diane's sense of self-preservation says, No. But we headed out anyhow.
I insisted we head toward the Convention Center, where all the major hotels are--perhaps we could find a restaurant there. We passed lots of obvious Worldcon attendees, carrying plastic bags and wearing plastic tags. We passed several brewpubs but no other types of restaurants. The restaurants in the Hyatt, the Sheraton, and the Marriott were all closed.
I stopped by the Concierge's desk at the Marriott to ask two questions: Did he know of any restaurants open this late? He did not. And, did he have any information on the Homicide tour?
Ooooh, that made him crazy. He knew he had had some information once, but no longer, and it wasn't listed in Cityscape (the free Baltimore paper). It made him nuts that he couldn't remember whom to call: the Society for Preservation of...something? He said, "I'll be in tomorrow at 3, I'll find out. Stop by."
Good deal. I had a date at 3.
We walked back toward the hotel. To be honest, our walk up until this point had been just fine. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary (if you ignore the guy with the cell phone standing outside of Camden Yards who went over to a car that stopped near him and stuck his head in the passenger side window).
But on the walk back, we walked past some of those delightful inner-city sights that had made me a wee bit nervous on the drive in. No, not the pair of platinum-blonde black hookers who sashayed by. Odd, but that was okay.
No, it was the passel of black teenagers hanging out, all of whom were wearing the uniform of a giant over-sized t-shirt and baggy jeans. You know, the kind of uniform designed to hide the gun tucked into the waistband. Hide, or just obscure. I noticed a couple of bulges.
Just keep walking.
Now, no one hassled us or looked at us funny. But you don't run across this kind of thing in the part of Los Angeles we live in. Probably only a few miles from us, we could find this, but not right around the corner.
I am one of those frightened white people, folks. I know that's incredibly uncool to admit to, but there it is. I got really nervous walking past these kids.
We continued walking past our hotel to the Hilton, where Darin saw Robert Silverberg and Frederik Pohl sitting in the lobby. There was also no restaurant save for the bar open at the Hilton, so I said, Let's go back, and we did.
Darin said, Let's not walk up Eutaw any more. I said, Okay. We might go back to see Poe's Grave, but in the daylight, and with firearms.
I'm incredibly flattered so many people showed concern over my internet addiction problem.
Well, I knew I was going cold-turkey while on vacation, which is just as well because I have been spending too much time online, to the detriment of getting other stuff done. When you have continual Internet access, you tend to use the Internet continuously--well, okay, I do. I check for updates on my favorite pages, I look for new pages, and since I get 250+ mail messages a day, I'm always getting mail. I thought getting away from the Internet was a good idea.
Also, I'd had a very bad day on Tuesday.
A really bad day.
On Monday, Darin said to me, "Do we leave tomorrow for Baltimore?" I said, No, we leave on Wednesday. Wednesday: I had that day stamped on my brain as the day we started our vacation.
On Tuesday, Darin worked, and I wrote some. I've taken to curling up on the bed in the guest room to write, because there's no Ethernet connection in the guest room. (Actually, there is, but there's no cord, and I've avoided seeking out a cord to plug in there.) I wrote and I watched YABAHM (Yet Another Bad ... Movie). Every two hours I took my computer back into my office to get mail.
At 6, I got a message from Our Intrepid Travel Agent, Young Lucy, asking if the flight was okay and did we like our hotel.
I ran to look at our tickets. Oh God, they were for Tuesday. Oh God. Oh God. I don't make those kinds of mistakes.
DIANE runs downstairs to DARIN's office, the tickets
in her hand.
DIANE
Darin? I messed up.
DARIN
(concerned)
What's wrong?
DIANE
We were supposed to leave today.
DARIN
Okay. It's okay. Calm down. Call
Lucy. Ask her what she can do.
Diane runs upstairs and looks for Lucy's number. She
calls.
RECORDING
The Redwood Travel Agency is now
closed.
Diane runs back downstairs, more frantic.
DARIN
Calm down. Let's call the airline.
We called the airline. Oops, sorry--you'll have to pay full fare now.
$1500.
Each.
I freaked out. I mean, I lost it. I handed the phone to Darin and ran out of the room and all I could think was, Oh shit. It feels to me like everything's been going wrong recently--or rather, that I've been doing everything wrong, that I'm a dweeb and a moron and (fill in blank) and now I've just ruined our vacation.
Darin, of course, was having none of this. For one thing, he does this kind of thing all the time. His last trip to Chicago he booked well in advance...only to find out he'd booked it on the wrong day and had to pay a couple of hundred dollars to switch it. He once had a ticket to Europe and forgot his passport in the bank--guess what that cost to change?
He's also traveled enough to know that the proper course of action is Keep calling. So he did and he found a United agent who said, "Hey, sure, just show up tomorrow at the gate, everything's fine."
Lucy called (having received my hysterical e-mails) and talked to Darin--I still wasn't in any shape to talk to anyone--and told him the important thing to do was to get the United agent's name and sine, so if anyone challenged our ticket change we could wave that in their faces.
I called the hotel in Baltimore; no one answered. Darin called the hotel in Baltimore; they answered immediately, said changing our reservation was fine, and we didn't even have to pay an extra night's fee.
So despite my amazingly large fuckup, nothing terrible happened. Unbelievably. But I was still shaken for the rest of the night, because I don't do that. Or I guess maybe I do.
Darin and I watched Maximum Bob Tuesday night, after all the travel change hilarity had died down. Although it's a little too self-consciously wacky--watch all these wild and strange Southerners do their things!--but I had a great time watching it anyhow. The guy blowing up cars? Great stuff.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com