Top Ten Travel Mishaps

Subtitled: 'Cause Surviving A Sunny Day at the Beach Is Easy.

Don't worry. No one got hurt, at least physically. Clearly, the mental scars linger on.

10. Fall 2010, El Paso: Lost luggage while visiting Andre's grandfather for the first time. All of it. Even the checked plastic sled from our failed sledding odyssey in White Sands National Park. Luckily, it happened on the return leg and only took a day to resurface.   

9. Summer 2004, Puerto Rico: Andre wipes out on the elegant, marble entrance to an exclusive hotel, after a tropical downpour. He escapes with no broken limbs, a mildly bruised ego and a gratitude that I was in the car and missed the whole show.

8. Spring 2003, Vegas: Heading home. Discover someone sideswiped our rental car, leaving our mirror dangling by a wire. Sort of reflects how we feel about Vegas in the first place. Personal policy covers damage.   

7. Summer 1999, Miami: Last night of honeymoon. Fancy dinner serves up a case of food poisoning. Front desk forgets our wake-up call. Miss flight. Get kicked out of hotel and rebooked in sister property. City in full party for holiday weekend. I want to die.

6. Summer 2001, Connecticut: Quick overnight getaway to casino wins me some sort of allergic reaction from the sheets and an itchy rash on every piece of skin that came in contact with them. Thankful I do not sleep in the nude.

5. Summer 2006, Florida Keys: More dermatitis, this time shared. Romantic nighttime snuggling in beachside hammock. We saw the moon and stars, the waves and sand, but not those hungry no-see-ums, feasting silently on our flesh.

4. Summer 2009, New Orleans: Have floor seats to Essence Music Festival. Expensive three day floor seats. Wait seven hours at airport for our outbound flight to get cancelled. No flights out of PVD until next week. Rebook via Hartford for the next day. Torrential downpours force us to turn car around. Find two tickets for following morning out of PVD. Arrive for start of show. Barely.       

3. Spring 2007, Boston: Room overlooking indoor pool at historic property. Super humid.Air doesn't work. Can't sleep. Multiple complaints to front desk. Hey, it's 3am, why don't we change rooms? Andre's $300 mouthguard? Lost in the shuffle. Exhausted. Irritated. Complain again. Get charged for mini-bar items from first room. Take action. Power of the pen gets refund--for all.

2. Winter 2010, St. Thomas: Gut not feeling good about upcoming trip to paradise. Always listen to gut. Two days before departure, receive phone call that our host's house burned down. Always, always, always listen to gut.  

1. Spring 2003, I-95 South from Providence to Maryland: Heading to a wedding. Start journey with automatic locks on car locking and unlocking. Return home to exchange vehicle for more reliable 1982 Mercedes. An hour into journey, get a high speed blow out on highway. During an April shower.

Call AAA. And wait. And wait. And wait. Andre decides he needs to relieve himself. Maneuvers over guardrail and down embankment. Takes care of business. My bladder's in dire straights. Convinces me to do the same. I'm desperate--and have absolutely no skill. Andre is a gentleman. Shields me from traffic with an umbrella, as well as offers helpful tips. In vain.

Climb ravine back to car. A Connecticut state trooper has arrived on the scene. The K-9 unit. Officer sees us emerging from the woods. Badgers Andre with questions about our woodland activities. Does not look at or address me. Andre, believing we'll get arrested for public urination, does not offer a straight answer. Now the cop is really suspicious.  After several tense minutes, I blurt out: I had to pee. The cop seems satisfied. He calls AAA--and off the dogs. Our journey resumes.

Drive to tire shop on doughnut. And wait. And wait. And wait. Finally discover the tech can't figure out how to put the car in gear to bring into bay. Andre instructs. Continue on journey with new tire. Blissfully uneventful until New Jersey turnpike. Traffic backed up because of car fire. Just glad it's not ours.

Finally arrive in Maryland, fourteen hours after we began. Andre decides to soak in hotel tub to rid of chills. Who soaks at a Holiday Inn? Exactly. Things are bad. Thinks he's fighting a sinus infection. I think he's having a nervous breakdown.

Oddly enough, the travel bug continues...   

Throwing That Garage Door Wide Open

"Don't worry," said Jackie. "If we happen to lose power during the procedure, the machine will release itself."

Of all the things, I may have been concerned about prior to my first mammogram--dull pain, crushing pain, stabbing pain-- being stuck in the imaging machine, in total darkness wasn't even on the radar.

"Yeah, that's happened to me before," she continued. "I asked the patient--are you okay?! And she said yes. That it had released."

Good to know.

I'm forty now. I've officially crossed into the 40-64 age bracket, with all the medical tests that go with it--including the much maligned baseline mammogram. Why does such a life saving procedure get such a bad rap? I was actually kind of curious to find out. So, here I stood, undressed from the waist up, opening in the front, ready for the festivities to begin.

When I booked the appointment, the woman on the other end immediately went into counseling mode. "I'm not scared," I interrupted. "I sort of like living."

Apparently not everyone feels this way. She told me about her neighbor, who refuses to have a mammogram. Sad stuff really. And you can probably place some blame on the analogies that are supposed to lighten the situation, like that slamming garage door bit.

At my appointment, Jackie and I became friends pretty quickly, as she confidently manipulated my breasts into position. And then, because it was the only reference I knew, I waited for the garage door to slam.

And waited.

And waited.

Luckily it never happened.

Indeed there was pressure. How else can you expect to squash breasts into abnormally flat pancakes. (They were. I looked. I don't advise that part.) And naturally, having a body part caught in a vise-like grip for any length of time is little out of the ordinary.

But outright pain? Nope.

Jackie, after piquing my interest by complimenting my pecs and youthful glandular tissue, gave me a look-see at one of the images. And then the party was over as soon as it began. A quick high-five of her latex gloved hand and I was back to my day already in progress.

To me, the test was actually quite satisfying. It provided a small peek inside my body, to prove that what I've been doing to keep myself strong all of these years, might just actually be working.

And for you? Maybe it's time to stop believing everything you hear.

What's YOUR motivation?

Andre never asks me to go anywhere.

And this is the reason, I wound up in the rafters at the Dunkin' Donuts Center on Monday, waiting to Get Motivated! After almost twenty years of forced chick flicks, I owed him.

Andre got sucked in by the appearance by retired Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz.

Fittingly, we missed him.

But we did manage to catch Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Cosby, Mary Buffett and Terry Bradshaw, with varying degrees of interest and entertainment, as well as quite an education.

We arrived around 11am, with my cynical guard already high, for good reason. Red flag number one: The on-line ticketing system, makes it appear like you can't check out without purchasing a $4.95 workbook, to go with your $1.95 ticket. Newsflash--you can. Just put in a zero for quantity.

Red flag number two: Attached to the ticket is a 'lottery form' for a chance to win prizes like an ipad and $10,000. I made the mistake of keeping blank form attached to our tickets, and was told by a Dunkin' Donuts employee that I had to fill it out at the lottery table before I could go in.

"I have to fill it out?"

"Yeah."

While I'm stepping aside to tear the lottery form off our tickets, put them in my purse, and enter through another line, one of the Get Motivated! staff approaches and in a Stepford wife kind of way and says, "Don't you want a chance to win $10,000?"

"No."

And to her little coy shrug, I continued the conversation in my head. Listen, you already have my name, e-mail, and mailing address. I think we're even. Plus, I'm not even convinced that you're going to give away any prizes today.  

Inside, the stage is set up like it's fight night. And on it is someone, not part of the advertised bill, in the midst of an infomercial for his product to crack the stock market. He's literally crawling on his belly on the stage. Red arrows. Green arrows. Four single moms with high school age kids 'randomly' chosen from the audience to illustrate how simple the tools are.

At the conclusion, he's selling $99 spots to his two day financial seminars, down from a high of $1200, along with the 'limited' red nylon bag that'll get you a free lunch. And now it's a mob scene. People are swarming to sign up. And if you missed that op, there were two different money making workshops with sign-ups in the afternoon session, for $49 and $29 respectively.

I left motivated alright--motivated to uncover the driving force of Get Motivated!

I'm going with desperation.

According to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for Providence, as of August 2011, was 10.4%. Next up on the tour? Nashville, with an unemployment rate of 8.5%. Then onto LA: 12.7% unemployment. Followed by Ontario, CA: 14.1% unemployment.

Sensing a pattern?

Oh, sure, I'm sure that one of the kind, gentle, evangelical, bible loving spirits on the Get Motivated! team would say they're sent to cities with high rates of unemployment in order to rally the downtrodden, help them succeed and spread God's love. I mean, didn't the Gospel singer in between acts communicate their innate goodness?

But the truth is, without their ability to spin or choose places where a sense of hopelessness, far outweighs common sense, Get Motivated! would not be in business. Besides, I'm not overly impressed with their sensitivity factor.

Take the pyrotechnics, for instance, used to add excitement while introducing acts on stage. Um, did 'ya get the memo that you're in a city/state that experienced an incredible nightclub tragedy less than ten years ago--started by indoor pyrotechnics?  Classy touch.

Or the slight overestimation of the number of attendees by the organizers by, oh, 4,000. The city used this info to delay school by two hours. But hey, you don't need a quality education to Get Motivated! In fact, things probably work a whole lot more smoothly if you don't have one.

As for the $10,000 winner? I really hope that she got her money. They were still looking for her when the event wrapped for the day, but I couldn't wait around.

I was overdue for a shower.

Who Dat?

Last week I got an invite for Dawn Brown.

Who?

Exactly.

I'm tempted to return it to sender, adopting the same method that I use to deal with telemarketers who call and ask for Mrs. Brown.

"Nope, sorry, no Mrs. Brown here." Click.

But somehow I don't think the karma that comes with making a point to family is worth it.

Maybe they just forgot. It has been over twelve years since I made a formal announcement, complicated with the fact that I'm the only rebel in my family who has gone this route. Or maybe they're just tied deep in tradition and can't comprehend any other way.

Regardless, it's all my fault. I should have just bowed to convention and taken my husband Andre's name, back in 1999, when I got married. But call me crazy, after twenty-seven years, I was quite attached to my name--in its entirety.

Andre's thoughts on the matter? "We don't have to have the same last name for me to know you're my wife." Amen to that. Now if we could just work on the rest of the world.

Like Andre's grandfather who said, "Now, why did you have to go and do that for?"

But he gets a pass. He's 80.

Or the former friend who accused me of disrespecting Andre's honor.

She gets a pass too. Far from 80, but she is divorced, on marriage number two, and has decided to honor husbands, past and present, by keeping both of their surnames. 

No such scandal here.

My name? Easy. Same as it ever was. It's Andre's name that I'm really worried about; he's increasingly being addressed as---Mr. Keable.

And responding.

Great Grandmas

"How's your writing?"

As a freelance writer, that's not always a question that you're excited to answer. Your writing could be fantastic (paid featured essay in Newsweek) or, more realistically, a wild marathon see-saw ride of highs and lows.

Regardless, my Grandma Erickson always made it a point to ask--not occasionally, or after a big article, but every single time that she saw me. She recognized that my writing was a passion, a profession, and a calling. And, just by consistently acknowledging, and celebrating, this major part of who I am, she indeed played a large role in cultivating it.

Today marks the eleventh anniversary of my grandmother's death.

And my writing today, Gram, is pretty darn good.