Flying to Milwaukee
The first day of my trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, beginning at about 10. I jumped on the Caltrain and zipped up to SFO, arriving just a little over an hour before my flight. I was a little hungry, so I made the mistake of grabbing a mini-cheese pizza at the Pizza Hut thing. Don’t ever do that. Ever.
The flight from SFO to Midway was relatively painless and quick, although it took a little over three and a half hours. I landed at Midway about four (I still think in Pacific time), and noticed that my flight was three hours later. Whee.
For those who have never flown to Midway, the best way I can think to describe it is that it exactly like a small-town airport, like Pasco (Washington) or Lewiston (Idaho), with thousands and thousands of people in it. It’s basically a very large toilet in which people scramble around aimlessly. They also have these 750 gigawatt fluorescent lamps under which you can feel your brain turning to jello.
I felt a headache coming on and decided it was a lack of caffeine in my system. So, I grabbed a Dr. Pepper. And, while I was at it, a little canlet of Pringle’s. Oooh….bad mistake. After that, I started to get nauseous, the headache was getting so bad under those fucking fluorescent lights. Of course, none of the vending carts or gift shops had a single tylenol or anything similar. Eight hundred versions of dramamine, kaopectate, and sucrets, but nothing useful to me.
Of course, my shuttle flight to milwaukee was delayed—by more than an hour. I jumped for the phone to call Brenda. “Please deposit four dollars ninety-five cents for the first two minutes, please.” Shit, I had 75 cents in quarters and some random dimes. Of course, nobody in the state of Illinois would break my five. I noted that it was about the time they’d have already left anyway.
Midway’s gate controls seemed to be run by a bunch of high school girls, who had nary a fucking clue what was going on. They took one group of Grand Rapids passengers to the turboprop plane on a shuttlebus, but it was the wrong plane, so they were brought back. “Wow. This doesn’t look like Grand Rapids,” one of them quipped, after the annoyance.
Finally, at about 10:40, we boarded the bus and waited for too long for people to figure something out, climbed aboard a little turboprop plane and took to the sky. Somewhere over Racine County, Wisconsin, after twelve hours under bright fluorescent sun lamps, greasy pizza, and pringles, I became sick enough to require the air discomfort bag for the first time ever. Blech.
Landed at Mitchell Field in milwaukee at 11:40, and Nate and Brenda were waiting patiently for me. I was really not in the mood to eat, except I did later because we ended up going out for some snacks. A trying and exhausting day of travel, but I finally made it to Milwaukee.