US Mess Part I

I am a walking disaster. Let’s not sugarcoat things, we all know it’s true! It’s all part of my charm and I’m not mad about it. I keep you on your toes, I keep myself on my toes, sometimes I even keep gravity on its toes. But I’ve come to find out that I’m strictly a US mess. My best friend and I went on a trip abroad recently and for nine glorious days, I kept all my wits about me. Well, mostly.

There are a lot of things I can say about traveling to and from. The first question everyone asks is, “How long is the flight?” The next question they ask is, “Is Iceland the green one or the cold one?” Oh yeah, baby, that’s right. We went to Iceland. And for your information, it’s the green one but that doesn’t stop it from being any less cold. The flight there wasn’t as long as you’d think it would be either! The international flight itself was five hours. But that’s because my best friend is a travel genius and found us a workaround. The trip from LA to Iceland though? I traveled for about thirty six hours. I worked a full eight hours, slept for about an hour, got myself and baby Al ready and drove the thirty minutes to the airport. We had to be there two hours before because Al had to get all checked by the initial front counter and TSA (so 2:30am) and it’s a good thing we allotted those two hours… I have never met more grown men who fall all over themselves at cats than the men who work at TSA. For both of the flights. They were holding up the lines so they could show me pictures of their cats. I loved it. You never make more friends than when you travel with a cat. The flight was four hours and forty minutes and Al did remarkably better than I anticipated he would. Then an hour drive from STL Lambert airport to my parents house. I hadn’t slept by that point. Caught up with my mom and got Al acclimated before taking a three hour long comatose nap due to my horrible, deadly, violent allergies brought on by my moms dog. That’s right, I’m allergic to dogs and cats! I woke up from that nap wishing I could’ve stayed under for at least several more hours, I haven’t felt that terrible in years. Joanne and I repacked the luggage to fit Icelandic specifications and got ready to meet Kollette! This flight was also at the crack of dawn so I went and stayed at her house overnight. We packed her bags, checked into all flights, and slept for two hours before heading to STL airport again. Now bear with me… We took a two hour flight from St Louis to Atlanta. Had an hour layover where we rode the plane train back and forth through various terminals. Took a two hour flight from Atlanta to Washington D.C. Had a five hour layover at Dulles where Kollette slept and I read a book (we got locked out of the terminal because we switched airlines so this took place on a bench). We ate a very exhausted but necessary dinner of salad, bread, pasta (which I later ended up leaving a trail of all through the floor of our car rental company, but that’s another story) and sangria. We then took our five hour overnight flight to Iceland that got in at 4am! I actually slept this flight contrary to others! Except it was induced by copious amounts of benadryl because those damn allergies came back and I had my contacts in still. When we got to Iceland, I ended up taking my contacts out while in line to get my passport stamped and slid my glasses on. I just put the discarded contacts in the travel kit to throw away later, I so did not care at that point. I was so tired and so relieved to not be wearing them anymore that when the guy at the window (I don’t know what this is called) asked if we were here for business or pleasure, I accidentally blurted out “PERSONAL!” This man looked at me like I was the dumbest. I felt like the dumbest. I just looked at Kollette and she was trying not to laugh, already well aware of my idiocies. We still laugh about that one because this man took such affront to me blurting this out at 4am that he started to ask me multiple in depth questions regarding our plans that week. He just let Kollette walk on past. 

We’re finally through the airport and pick up our checked bag and spend at least an hour in the duty free store picking out candy, champagne, and boxed wine. Now, I’m under twenty-five so I’ve never rented a car before and neither has Kollette. We were so confused because every single car rental imaginable is there with pickup signs except the company we rented from… Every. Single. One. I even went up and asked a different company what would happen if we just took a shuttle bus and winged it (at this point, we KNEW our company wasn’t even a stop for the shuttle)—he said he didn’t recommend it. Shocker. 

Right as we’re about to comically make our first International (expensive) call to the rental with hesitancy all over our eyes and my thumb barely hovering over the call button, we see Taron Eggerton’s doppelganger holding our sign and rush over.  The first words out of the mouth of the guy we’re renting the car from? “Girls, I hope you brought warmer clothes than that?” It set the tone for the rest of the trip. We were wearing skirts and rainboots. It also coined us the grouped nickname “Girls” for the rest of the trip. 

So, I’ve slept minimally, it’s freezing, we’ve just received a loving lecture about how easily car doors can break off their hinges and fly off if you don’t park facing the wind. It’s 8am and we don’t have a hotel room until after all our plans that day… In other words, twelve hours later. We went to the bank first to get Icelandic Krona then we go into the first place that caught my eye… The Phallological Museum. Kollette humored me and I’m so glad we went. What a fun way to start the morning when you’re already deliriously tired and just changed clothes in your car which was parked in the middle of a parking lot! Truly though, the best way to start the trip. And all we did was go into the gift shop! That would be the first place I would go, huh. 

We spent the majority of that day doing the Reykjavik tourist thing, got wool scarves (which became our most treasured possessions the second the wind hit us), austrian and icelandic chocolates, souvenirs for all the requisite people, and visited a church, a park full of water birds, and figured out what the hell a WC is. And that we love them. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the incident with the water birds. Mind you, we are deliriously tired, severely jetlagged, and despite it being morning twelve hours ago it’s still morning? We see a man standing on the edge of a dock feeding bread to all the birds at the pond. I’m talking about hordes of swans, mallard ducks, and the smaller one that I don’t know what it’s called—I refer to them as the water bird. Intrigued by the pretty animals, we go stand near him and watch. One of the male swans took that time to piss off another male swan. We’re going to call the latter Alpha Swan and the former Swan #2. So, Swan #2 pissed off Alpha Swan, and Alpha Swan was very  much not enthused. He starts racing after Swan #2 wings wide and gliding through the air as Swan #2 realizes he needs to fear for his life and begins his escape, squawking to all hell at the top of his little swan lungs. Alpha Swan catches up and BITES Swan #2’s tail (re: butt). And I mean, he LATCHES onto him… Swan #2 tries to fly through the air and gets one webbed foot on the dock before Alpha Swan drags him back down into the water. He then makes his true escape and as soon as he gets to the middle of the pond, starts posturing to Alpha Swan?? I was so confused by this. Bro, you just lost that fight! The whole sequence took less than seven minutes and we are losing our minds over it. Because what the duck?

We end up going to a chic dive bar for a few drinks and a snack, catching up since we haven’t seen each other in nine months. We each had an espresso martini and a prosecco and somehow this is what happens next? We’re laughing, walking back to the car when we come upon a chonky charcoal cat (say that five times fast). He’s sitting in the middle of the sidewalk staring at us. This was like a commercial epitomizing the Cat Distribution System. We stop and look at him. He locks eyes with us then looks up to his right. An open window on the second story of an apartment building. He looks back at me. Back at the window. Ahhh…. That’s when it dawns on me, that’s his home; he’s an indoor/outdoor cat! We’d been seeing a lot of domestic cats coming and going, some wearing collars and some not. So, what do I do? I look at Kollette and say, “I’m going to help him get back up!” I cover my hands with my sleeves because, hello, rabies! I lift the chonker and help him onto the ledge; he didn’t understand at first because I’m so short that I couldn’t fully reach. But once he got it, his eyes lit up and he met me halfway. Next thing I know, that man is GONE. It’s at this point Kollette and I looked at each other and she said “that cat definitely does not live there, Sam.” Well, he does now! That dweller is in for a treat later. We end up sprinting down the sidewalk, laughing, happy to escape the scene of the crime. There seems to be a weird pattern of animal stories on that trip. Not to mention, for about five days straight after that I just randomly chased unwilling sheep through the Icelandic countryside. At one point I was throwing graham crackers near them hoping they would eat them and it would make them like me? Wishful thinking. Kollette got a lot closer, getting to take a very nice portrait of a couple. It turns out they thought I was aggressive? I don’t understand why.