I left my house at about 9:30AM local time, and arrived on Bonaire about 30 hours later. We decided to leave from Portland because it was cheaper, which means a 3 hour drive to and from the airport. Because this is relatively uncharted territory, my mother decided we needed to be a little early for our 10:30PM flight. After all, who knows what kind of savages staff PDX? We might be forced into day-long TSA lines.
The drive down alternated between dark and gray, and dark and stormy. Most of western Washington is having flooding issues, having received 2.06" of rain in 24 hours, followed immediately by another storm. It was pretty dismal. This is the best picture I managed to capture of one of the rare rain breaks.
We got to Portland early enough for me to hit a Dead Robin with some of my friends, then headed to the airport. Having arrived a mere 6 hours early to our flight, we were ushered through TSA faster than I have ever seen. There was literally no line ahead of us, and the longest any of us paused was when one officer told me he was surprised they could ID me with blue hair. I pointed out it was blue on my passport and we were good to go.
My mother was pretty sure we could sneak into the first class lounge at United, so we went with that plan, which was much better than sitting at a gate with the rabble. Mostly because we got free wine, cheese, and cookies and fancy comfy chairs. This was the dinner of champions:
The Portland airport is very Portlandy. There are actual food trucks, and lots of farm-to-table, trendy restaurants. There is also an enormous Glockenspeil, which looses a "free-range chicken" on the hour rather than the traditional cuckoo. I made my mother stand next to it for scale.
The numbers are all Portland iconic things like microbrews, bicyles, and the weird little sparrow every trendy Portlander has tattooed on her chest to be original.
We made the flight without any fuss, it was a red eye arriving in Newark, NJ at right about 7AM.
The Newark Airport is as aggressively New Jersey as Portland's is hipster. It is sort of like The Airport That Time Forgot. I saw several shops there that I literally havent seen since the 80s. I didnt even know The Body Shop still existed. Maybe it doesnt, it is just stuck in a pocket of time here with the Swatch store and some white courtesy telephones.
After browsing one of the many Italian markets on offer, we boarded our plane uneventfully and I watched Ant Man for four hours until we were in Bonairean airspace.
We landed about 3PM local time. The airport is decorated to the nines for Christmas... An event my mother promises me is less consumeristic and more religious than the US version. This sounds like my worst idea of Christmas, which I think should be more candy/less Christ, but it will be an adventure. You can see the bells blowing in the wind over baggage claim because the airport is largely open air. Someone has removed the clappers from them, so there was no accompanying cacophony, which i thought would have added some festivity to the claiming of baggage.
We got a ride to the house, and my mother began the traditional OCD unpacking/cleaning frenzy while my father and I headed to the store. It was a quick trip because we were tired, and although we managed to avoid many impulse buys, my mother was upset about the lack of vegetables we brought home. (Im not sure if she meant bacon or not.) The most exciting part to me was that one store had Santa photos of children. Since the island is now officially Dutch, the children are also surrounded by the traditional six-to-eight black men. If you dont know about this tradition, or want to revisit it via the genius of David Sedaris, then follow this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NYdpte1W0vk (The blogger app hasnt improved much in the year and a half since i last tried to use it, so you will have to copy and paste the link yourself. i promise that itll be that much more rewarding since youve had to put in this extra effort.)
We had a brief donkey visitation at sunset, which was so exciting that I broke my camera. Between my dad and i messing with it, I think it is back in order, so will hopefully have better-than-phone quality photos coming next post. After 30+ hours of travel, the disappointment of a broken camera was enough to send me to bed at 8PM, well before both the skinnydipping hour and my parents.
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