Welcome to America

I left my Paris apartment on the evening of Dec 7^th and went to CDG airport to stay at a hotel and get on the plane early enough to get to London Gatwick airport early the next morning so that I would have time to meet my daughter Sadie and get on our Norse Air flight to Las Vegas that midday. We would arrive that same afternoon of the 8^th of December. We rented a cheap hotel for that night so that we could pick up our Dodge Caravan the next morning, all tricked out with a bed in back. We planned to use it as a camper van for our two-week driving holiday.

Sadie had found the really cheap airfare from Londo to Vegas and then schemed up a road trip so that she and I could see the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley on our ride down to Albuquerque to see her cousins. We talked of going to Tucson as well to see some old friends but our plans worked out differently.

First, my flight from Paris was delayed because of the storm that had just devastated western Britain. I boarded our EasyJet and we were all ready to take off when the captain got word from Gatwick that we should wait for ‘up to an hour and a half’ before taking off. The crew tried to downplay the delay but I made them explain it to everybody clearly over the loud speaker because people were not understanding. I was typical in that I had only given myself 3.5 hours for the transfer at Gatwick. Predicatbly many became concerned over transfers; I called Sadie (our booby prize was being able to use of our cell phones) to tell her the bad news. Of course, she had got on a 5:00 am bus out of Bristol in order to get to the airport on time – so she was standing by. She tried to take care of business for me, but Norse air had no online check-in and couldn’t let her check in for me until I was was standing there physically. Meanwhile, Gatwick was a zoo because so many flights had been cancelled the night before, so poor Sadie ran around trying to be helpful, and only ended up paying an extra sixty pounds to check her bag and then an extra forty to sit next to me, which they wouldn’t allow after all so she is still working on getting that money back. Customer Service was not on their priority list.

Luckily though, I met and chatted with a young Lebanese man in Paris who was also going to Los Vegas, so he and I made ourselves feel better about the chaos at the airport. He also informed me, with tears of joy in his eyes, that Asad had been ousted from Syria. …..effing finally!!!! The young man’s family were refugees to France and he now had a good IT job that was paying his way to Vegas for a conference. He said it was the last time he would use cut rate airlines like Norse.

I did meet Sadie in time and we decided that if we ever do a trip like this again it would be important to give ourselves a full night for any international ‘self-transfer’.  I am old enought to remember when international air travel was considered somewhat classy and when they pampered us; now days tt is very like being exported beef to be slaughtered on arrival, but we made it intact. And our adventure began.

Upon arrival at Reid International Airport in Vegas (perversely at 3 pm, though it had been a 10 hour flight and we had left at noon), I wanted to get a taxi to our Days Inn hotel “near the Strip”. We saw no taxi stand, and it was hard to figure out how and where to get the Uber. Luckily Sadie had the app and we followed some other incoming tourists to a strange parking spot a long walk from the terminal….

Neither of us could get our foreign phones to work for a while either. But ultimately Sadie got it figured out. I could have called Bolt except that Bolt appears to not work in the USA – where it’s Uber or Lyft exclusively I guess. Live and learn.

Eventually, our Uber did finally show up, and as if we all knew exactly what he was doing he texted us ‘Hi’ instead of telling us where he was – but we did have his license plate number and we found the car well within the zone of a normal place to be.

But the driver was being harassed by a man in a ‘gillet jaune’ – as the French called their demonstrators who wore the same ‘high viz’ yellow vests. We walked up and said hi and the driver said “the trunk is there” as he rifled through his papers. The parking guard said “find another uber”. But we put our bags in the trunk and got into the car because we had already paid and it was too late to cancel.

Then we waited as the driver, with a strong Hispanic accent, repeated how legal he was and how he just had to find his proof. The gillet jaune, a bearded, black man, was clearly losing patience. Then words were exchanged and I thought of pulling on my [old school marm’ energy to break up a fight. But I decided that in the land of free guns I should stay quiet. Sadie meanwhile was being charged by Uber for keeping her driver waiting so in her exasperation she said “Welcome to America” loudly enough for both the young men to hear. The gilet jaune guard wrote a ticket for the driver for not having his work permit ready to show. The driver didn’t want to have a ticket, and kept saying “I am legal” in such a way to make me believe he wasn’t. Then the guard said something like “this is my country and you have to follow our rules” and walked away……YUCK.

So the driver drove off with his parking ticket and us in the back seat. Sadie and I had decided to speak no more because we were just upsetting the peace accord – two men having a pissing contest in front of two women, seemed all too classic. My first impulse, after years of experience in Kenya, had been to offer a bribe but that would have been pretty bad I think.

Luckily, I personally didn’t see how upset the driver was as he left the scene of the rumble.  He was rubbing his eyes and taking his hands off the steering wheel while driving: I would have screamed, but Sadie sagely asked “you alright bro?”. This was clearly what the driver needed to hear, in order to keep driving with his eyes open, and thus get us safely to our hotel. But it undammed a flood of inappropriate reactions to the parking guard personally and about America vrs Cuba in general. It was unpleasant to hear all his vitriol (including discussions of how regularly the guard ‘got laid’) but ultimately he did drive us safely to our hotel. Sadie asked for our money back on the ‘keeping the driver waiting’ front – but I don’t know if she got it.

In retrospect that nastiness between to the two hustling young America men sorta symbolized the debacle that is American culture today: they were each frantic and not comfortable with their lives. The yellow vested man may well have been targeting the immigrant driver and looking for trouble – we noticed that our driver was certainly the only one getting this kind of hassle. And the driver, in his own right, was not taking the rules and regulations of the Harry Reid international airport seriously, for whatever reason.

They were both rude and both had their hackles up, ready for a fight. It felt like a tinderbox.

Our hotel was fine, in a typical 1950s motel style, with our parking space right in front of our door.  Our room was complete with two queen-sized beds, a refrigerator and a heater that we were able to turn on. But I did notice that I don’t like American shallow bathtubs, without a handheld faucet for the shower. And the toilets are much less efficient than in Europe as well. But breakfast was free and okay, a pastry and a cup of coffee, but also an orange and a pouch of instant oatmeal each.

What was a bit jarring was that our room was directly under a huge billboard – like three hotel rooms big – that said: “Injured at a Hotel?” in huge letters followed by a local number. If that billboard had fallen we would have been seriously injured, that’s for sure.

Welcome to America.