Category: Travel Stories

Route 2: The Highway That Was My Personal Obstacle Course

Posted on by Kai Raine

It’s been a long time since I blogged a travel story. All my Murphy’s Law of Transportation stories so far have been about public transportation, so today I’d like to talk about the

This coming week my sister’s moving out of the apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts where she lived for her college career. I spent a large chunk of the last two years living with our aunt and grandparents in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, so I got to visit her semi-regularly. The trip between the two towns was pretty straightforward, but typically took about an hour and a half, though it could be longer with traffic. Most of that trip was spent driving on Route 2.

How I loathed Route 2.

For some reason, for the first year, one of every two ventures I made out to Amherst featured nerve-wracking moments. On Route 2, where the speed limit is 55mph, but everyone typically seems to drive at 70-75mph.

Random tangent: I’m guessing that traffic slows down when the weather is bad. My trips were always voluntary, so I never made the drive when the weather looked like it might make things difficult. After leaving Route 2, there was another 30+ minutes of driving on windy, hilly roads in the middle of nowhere. The prospect of ice and rain was not a welcoming one on these roads. I have made the trip out of Amherst in bad weather, but not the trip to Amherst. Which is what this post is about.

The stress of these events—3 of which I remember vividly—contributed to my stress at the prospect of making the drive, making my trips out to Amherst less frequent than I had expected them to be.

Incident #1

The first incident happened during maybe my second or third drive to Amherst, when I was still not quite sure of the roads. There was a lot of traffic that day, but going quite fast. I was in the row of cars in the left lane.

(Route 2 is a 2-lane highway for most of this trip, except the last stretch where it became a 1-lane highway. Yes, the left lane is supposed to be for overtaking, but when there are people stubbornly doing the speed limit, the left lane becomes the 70mph travel lane, while the right lane is the 55mph travel lane.)

The car in front of me was a bigger car than mine. (Not unusual. I drove a 2-door VW GTI.)

In front of that car was a big truck. You know, one of those gigantic things.

So that’s the scene: me in my little car, on an unfamiliar highway that goes on forever. I just have time to see something red by the truck’s tires when the car in front of me swerves.

Now, I learned to drive in Germany, where it was strictly drilled into me to never swerve when startled. I was taught to break.

So I don’t swerve. But I can’t break suddenly either, because the car behind me is quite close. I break, but slowly. I just have time to register that it was one of those bright red plastic fuel containers, and then I’ve driven over it. (Between the wheels, at least.) I hear it dragging for a few seconds, then I hear it release. In the rearview mirror, I see the car behind me swerve, but not enough, and catch the container under itself, too.

When I got back to my grandparents’, I took the car to a local mechanic just to check that I hadn’t hurt anything. He was very nice, checking the car and reassuring me that there was no damage at no charge.

Incident #2

This time, I was relatively accustomed to the drive. But the gas container incident hadn’t quite faded from my memory on the day that I was driving down Route 2, again in the left lane, again in traffic.

Around the same place where the gas container incident had happened, again I encountered an obstacle! This time, it was a white plastic trash bin, lying across the left half of the lane.

Luckily, everyone was swerving around it so it was visible a good few seconds beforehand, rather than coming out of nowhere. The cars in the right lane were spaced far enough apart that this was not too difficult.

Incident #3

By this point, the it had become a bit on an inside joke among my friends that Route 2 was my personal obstacle course.

I was also growing more confident in my driving. After all, if I’d managed not to get into an accident so far, I was doing pretty well. So my guard was perhaps a little bit lowered one sunny day.

I drove without incident past the areas where I’d formerly encountered obstacles. Traffic was sparser than usual, but both lanes were moving fast: probably 65-70mph.

I was more than half way through my course on Route 2 when I rounded a corner and saw, just a split second before I had to react…

A couch.

Sitting there blocking off 2/3 of the left side of the right lane was a couch. Not lying sideways or anything, no. It was upright, looking perfectly comfy and innocent.

Fortunately, being in the left lane (as usual), I only had to veer to the leftmost side of my lane to avoid the couch.

People in the right lane were swerving into the shoulder, and I’ve never been so relieved to see that there was a shoulder to the highway. (Sections of this highway don’t have a shoulder; had this happened in any of those places, this would have undoubtably resulted in a massive pile-up.)

In summary: driving is dangerous, but I’ve somehow been extremely lucky.

The Hostel in Paris (Final)

Posted on by Kai Raine

On my last night in Paris, I woke up shivering uncontrollably, my head splitting from a headache, my stomach full of nails, my eyesight blurry and my muscles weak. I had a fever.

Immediately I panicked. I had to check out the next day. I had a flight to catch, and a 17-hour layover in Denmark followed by another flight. I couldn’t do that if I was so sick.

I knew the solution: calm, sleep and water.

I mustered the strength to go to the bathroom for water. Back in bed, I texted a friend for calm. I didn’t need to urge the sleep: its pull was inexorable.

I kept waking every hour or two, and I would go to the bathroom and get water and go back to sleep. I considered extending my stay, but even the thought of the cost was stressful. I thought of extending my room reservation for one night so that I could at least stay in bed until I had to leave for the airport. But the thought of finding clothes and going to reception and talking was too exhausting.

I stayed in bed until past 11. Sleep and water did the trick and my fever receded. I had 7 hours between check out and take off and nowhere in particular to go, so I kept my arrangement to meet a friend for lunch. We went for lunch (where I had only soup and many, many drinks) after which she took me to a manga cafe where I passed out on the couch until my Parisian sister arrived to say goodbye.

I made it to the airport and slept through the flight to Copenhagen.

In Copenhagen, I took a taxi to my hotel and arrived after midnight. I adopted the same strategy again, leaving my luggage and clothes near the door and showering, then going to bed with only a towel.

Curled up in the bed, I passed out once again.

In the morning, I slept late and missed breakfast. When I got up, I was still weak, still in pain, still sick, but at least able to walk without feeling too queasy. I decided to try walking around the area. The lady at the reception desk lamented that she could not refund breakfast for me, but let me back into the kitchen to offer me tea, for which I was immensely grateful. As I drank the tea, I was given all sorts of advice about exploring the fishing village or taking a bus into Copenhagen.

I was excited to follow their advice, but when I finished my tea and stepped outside, my feet carried me away from the village, away from Copenhagen, away from Sweden and Denmark’s tunnel-bridge of friendship, toward the ocean.

I had a long and pleasant walk along the water, though I didn’t dare go as far as I wanted, knowing that as weak as I was, I might not be able to get back. I walked through the village as well, my admiration for the area overriding my pain and discomfort for a time. It was a pleasant walk, despite everything, and well worth the discomfort and exhaustion it cost me.

Denmark gave me a good ending to this grueling tale.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 6)

Posted on by Kai Raine

The hotel where I spent my last night in Paris was simple, but nice. Though I had left the hostel suspecting bedbugs without confirmation, I was determined not to spread any possible infestation if I could avoid it.

I left my luggage close to the door and separated my clothes into two categories: probably safe and probably unsafe. Unfortunately, my coat, sweater and scarf had all hung on a hook attached to the bed, putting them in the “probably unsafe” category. It was also too cold to go without them, and I hadn’t brought alternative options.

I put all the “probably unsafe” clothes in a plastic bag that I stuffed in my suitcase, but I needed the sweater, scarf and coat. I set them on top of my suitcase and contemplated going without cold weather gear for my remaining day. I decided I’d make a decision in the morning.

I took a long, hot shower and headed to bed in a towel. On the way to bed, passing by one of the large mirrors on the wall of the room, I got my confirmation of bedbugs: a path of bites going down the inside of my arm from elbow to the back of my shoulder in an ugly cluster, and then another trail going down my side to my waist.

I took photos of the bites, so that I could identify any new bites if they showed up.

But for then I was tired. I crawled into bed with my sister’s book that I had almost finished and meant to finish before I left the following day, but had no energy to read. I fell straight to sleep.

That was when the fever hit.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 5)

Posted on by Kai Raine

After 2 nights in the hostel, I started to notice itchy patches of bug bites on my skin. I ascribed it to mosquitos: I was spending a fair amount of time walking around outside, and a fair amount of that walking had been through the vegetation of Pere Lachaise.

It wasn’t until my 4th night, making the 4th bed I’d had in as many nights, that it suddenly occurred to me that bedbugs were a more likely culprit than mosquitos. My suspicions seemed confirmed when I woke at 3AM to fresh itching. It seemed to me that no matter how I lay, I opened myself up to being bitten.

I only intended to stay 5 nights, and I was already there for the 4th. Only one and a half more nights, I told myself.

I rolled over and a fresh patch of bites revealed themselves on the upper arm that had been below me.

Suddenly, the thought was inescapable. This place had bedbugs. I was sleeping in a nest of bedbugs. I thought back to the beds and the bedclothes. Nothing had seemed obviously infested. The rooms were tidy, the mattress covers perfectly white, the bedclothes freshly laundered.

At last I could no longer bear the thought of another night in the hostel, and decided that it was worth the money if I could just not get any fresh bites for my final night.

It was with that thought that I reserved a hotel room across Paris for my 5th night. I chose a place that had the earliest check-in time I could find among affordable-ish options, and paid as much for that 1 night as I had for the 5 nights in the hostel.

In the morning, I checked out without breakfast.

“But you have one more night,” the staff at reception said to me.

“I decided to leave early,” I said simply.

I did not mention bedbugs. I had seen no confirmation—although, admittedly, I didn’t look very hard, too worried of the distress confirmation would cause.

I simply left, and took my things across town.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 4)

Posted on by Kai Raine

When, on the 4th evening, I returned to the hostel to find that not only was bed 13 still occupied, but bed 7 now had a new occupant as well, I was not remotely surprised. Fortunately, it was in the evening during regular hours before anyone was asleep. There were only 3 other girls already in the room, and all of them were awake and chatting when I came in. I saw at a glance that my beds were not available and immediately returned downstairs. The man from the reception desk came upstairs with me and, after checking that everyone was decent, came into the room.

Here I explained, once again, that I was supposed to be in bed 13, but there was a person (not present but with her belongings left on the bed) who had taken over that bed the previous night. So I had spent the previous night in bed 7, but there was now a person in that bed as well.

The person in bed 7 added that she was actually supposed to be in bed 8, but that appeared to be occupied so she had taken the bed above it. The person in bed 9 chimed in that she was supposed to be in bed 5, but that appeared to be occupied as well.

The frazzled man from reception tried to remember all of this at first, but finally had to return downstairs to return with a piece of paper, notating where we had been assigned and where we all now were sleeping. He also stripped bed 5, figuring that that was the best way to figure out who was in that bed, and asked us to send to reception anyone we saw occupying bed 3, which was also supposed to be empty but too covered in personal belongings for him to strip.

Throughout the remainder of the evening, girls entered the room only to immediately leave again, returning momentarily with the man from reception, informing him of which bed they were supposed to be in. Apart from one girl peacefully looking at her phone the whole while in bed 14, no one seemed to be in the bed that they were assigned.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 3)

Posted on by Kai Raine

On my third night, I once again returned to the hostel past 1AM—and once again, I found my bunk occupied. Without so much as setting down my bags, I returned downstairs to reception to inform them, expecting to find that my bed assignment had been unexpectedly changed once more.

However, to our mutual bewilderment, my bed assignment was still 13.

“We can’t go into the women’s room,” the men at the reception desk explained to me. “But if you could ask the girl her name, or which bed she’s supposed to be in, we can figure things out.”

I returned to the room and touched the girl’s shoulder.

“Excuse me. What’s your name?”

She gave me a sleepy smile and a confused hum. I repeated my question.

“Anne,” she mumbled.

“Do you know which bed you’re supposed to be in?” I asked.

Her response was not in a language I understood, but it sounded Slavic. I had the sense that she was telling me that she didn’t speak English. I left her to go back to sleep and returned downstairs to inform them that her name was Anne. Unfortunately, they did not seem to have an Anne listed. They decided that I would sleep in bed 12.

I returned upstairs with one of the men from the reception desk, who came with a new set of sheets. He stood in the doorway as I checked bed 12, but there was a person here, as well.

“Is there any empty bed?” he asked me.

I walked through the room, and though there were a few beds without occupants, only one of those was also without sheets. That bed was bed 7. I asked if I could take bed 7.

“But bed 7 is supposed to be occupied,” he said. “See, there’s a pile of sheets there.”

Indeed there was, and with a few personal clothing items beside.

We returned downstairs and after some deliberation, it was decided that I would take bed 7 for the night after all.

I placed the clothing onto the made-but-unoccupied lower bunk, made the bed in the dark and lay down. I couldn’t sleep. I was convinced that the moment I drifted off, the bed’s rightful occupant would come along and wake me.

The sun was beginning to dawn by the time I finally managed to sleep.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 2)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I barely slept on my first night in the hostel. I fell asleep past 4 and was woken by the clamor around the room just past 6:30. I went downstairs for breakfast only to find, to my disappointment, that they served only coffee without mugs, orange juice that tasted more like fanta than orange, cereal with milk (which I couldn’t have as I’m lactose intolerant), and plain, white pieces of square supermarket bread with packets of butter and marmalade. I had some toast, some orange juice and some coffee in a glass before I left for the day.

I returned early that evening exhausted and desperate for sleep. For once, my bed was unoccupied. I curled up in it and drifted off. Less than an hour later I was woken by a pair of girls chatting as they entered the room and found their beds. Soon enough they recognized my presence and their voices quietened to a whisper, but I still heard them giggling at the notion of someone already in bed. Nevertheless, half an hour later one of the girls was curled up in the bunk next to mine.

I slept in bursts, attaining a cumulative 8 or so hours of sleep over the 16 hours that I lay in bed (with occasional trips out of it for hydration or the bathroom). By morning, I was sufficiently well-rested and in a cheerful mood. When an alarm of piano music and birdsong woke me around 7 and continued to ring for half a minute before its owner put it on snooze, I was unbothered. I simply rolled over and opened my book. I remained unbothered when the same alarm continued to go off every five minutes for the next hour.

I breakfasted on toast, coffee (for which there were now mugs), juice, and cereal with soy milk that I had bought for myself. My mood was high as I left the hostel.

Unbeknownst to me, it was the last good night’s sleep I would have for nearly a week.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 1)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I stayed in a hostel in Paris for a few nights. On the day that I arrived, I checked in and paid for my stay, and was assigned to bed 3 in a 14-bed dorm. I was given sheets, so I made my bed and headed off to meet some friends.

When I returned past 1 in the morning, exhausted and ready to crash, I entered the dark, silent room and found a girl in my bed. She was on her phone, so I told her that that was my bed. She assured me that it was hers and suggested that perhaps I had the wrong room.

“Room 4, bed 3?” I said.

“Huh. But they gave us these beds,” her friend in the upper bunk chimed in. “Beds 3 and 4.”

I showed her my key card with my bed and room number.

“I believe you,” she said. “But these were the beds they gave us.”

“Was the bed made, when you arrived?” I asked the girl.

“No,” she said with a small smile.

Resigned, I went back down to the reception desk and explained my situation.

“Bed 3,” said the man at the desk. “Are you Elizabeth?”

“No,” I said. I gave him my name.

“But you haven’t checked in?” he asked.

“No, I have.”

“But you didn’t pay?”

“I did.”

He went through the book of receipts and eventually found mine. He assigned me bed 13, gave me new sheets and exchanged my key card, and I returned upstairs.

Making my new bed in the dark, I discovered that I was missing my blanket. The person in the bunk beneath mine seemed to have appropriated it, presumably having assumed that no one would be taking that bunk that night.

I went back to the reception desk and was informed that there were no extra blankets.

Returning to the room, I turned on the reading light on the bunk and started making the bed, postponing the inevitable waking of the person in the lower bunk. In my irritation, however, I wasn’t as quiet as I could have been while making my bed. Just as I was finishing fitting the sheet on the mattress, an arm emerged from below, offering me a handful of the blanket.

With a “Merci,” I took the blanket and curled up. Just as I was getting ready to sleep, another small commotion began on the opposite corner of the room. It was past 4 by the time I got to sleep.

The Girls Visiting Indian Boyfriends

Posted on by Kai Raine

As a teen, I would often converse with the person in the seat beside me. On two separate occasions, I met girls with very similar stories: they were in their twenties and visiting boyfriends in India that they had gotten to know over email. One was a German girl dating a Muslim boy; the other was an American girl dating a Hindu boy. I met them approximately three years apart, but it never ceases to astonish me how similar their stories seemed.

They had gotten to know their boyfriends through some interaction on a website, and ended up swapping emails. After that, they had corresponded for a time, getting to know each other (and falling in love). The boyfriends, in both cases, had visited the girls in their home countries once. In both cases, I was meeting the girls on their first trip to India—though I met the German girl on her flight to India and the American girl on her flight back to the US.

Both of them had a lot to say on the subject of the obstacles that lay in their paths in the form of religion. I listened, but it wasn’t a subject that was very interesting to me at the time, beyond analyzing the cultures and why people insist on laying those obstacles before inter-religious and inter-racial relationships.

Both girls were fascinated when I said that I was the product of such a marriage, and were fascinated to hear my parents’ story. They expressed surprise when I explained that my parents simply got married, neither of them being particularly attached to religion or cultural tradition. They would then go on to wonder aloud whether their boyfriend would be willing to entertain this as a possibility (both of them found it doubtful).

I met the German girl first, when I was fifteen. She was cynical, fairly certain it wouldn’t work out in the end. Perhaps because I met her first, she had much wisdom and many observations to share that I had never before thought to consider. I was still in my youthful fairy tale mind, convinced that love could conquer all. She was very laid back, and willing to foster the relationship for as long as it lasted, even if it was not going to be for life, or even for that much longer.

The American girl was more specifically critical in her assessment of her situation. “Why can’t he just say no to his parents?” she would complain to me. “I don’t know if I can live with a man who can’t stand up to his parents.” She then went on to exposit about the differences between American and Indian culture,* naming things that were very familiar to me and leaving me to shrug and smile. I offered some advice based on observations I had made, but I got the impression that she wasn’t interested in my opinion as much as she just wanted to vent.

I kept in touch with the German girl for a few years afterwards; the American girl and I went our separate ways after our flights and never corresponded. I do know that the first girl’s relationship lasted through that trip and for some months afterwards before her boyfriend caved to his parents and broke things off.

*I am aware that both of these are very culturally diverse nations. This is meant to indicate the experiences of India and American culture as lived by myself and this one girl. It is not meant to be a generalization.

My Longest Flight and Longest Night

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my family was living in India and I was attending university in Alaska, I usually had to take a minimum of five flights to get from the start of the trip to the end. After my first semester, when we booked my flights around the semester and then had to pay booking change fees when we knew my exam schedules, my mother decided to send me back to Alaska on a one-way ticket so that we could book the next round trips around my vacations rather than around my semesters. That one-way trip was the only time when I had only four flights, and it was a terrible experience.

My route went as follows: a domestic flight from Hyderabad to Delhi, followed by an excruciatingly long flight from Delhi to LA (via London, where it stopped for fuel). From there I was to fly to Fairbanks via Seattle.

Since I was a child, I had loved long flights. I loved the chance to watch movie after movie or immerse myself in a book, and later, once I had my own computer, to do whatever I liked for a hours at a time with no distraction except flight attendants bringing drinks and food.

This flight was long enough to put a dent in my enjoyment. For one thing, there was no personal entertainment system. Normally, this was endurable; this flight, however, was nearly 24 hours in duration.

It was, unfortunately, made even longer by the fact that we were delayed several hours.

Worse still, after we landed in LA, it took me a solid two more hours to make my way through the slow-moving, pushy line of immigration (just the memory is enough to inspire gratitude for those automatic terminals that they’ve been using for the last few years).

Naturally, by the time that I made it through immigration, it was four or five hours after I was supposed to have landed, and my connecting flight had gone. There was a line of people being rebooked before they went out of customs, so I joined the line and waited another hour.

Of course, once I reached the front of the line, I was informed that because Air India had nothing to do with Alaska Airlines and my tickets had been booked separately, I had to go talk to Alaska Airlines instead.

Air India and Alaska Airlines were two terminals apart, and the terminal in the middle was under construction, and therefore deserted and dark as I rushed through it, ignoring the shadows in my imagination.

Naturally, Alaska Airlines informed me that because they were not affiliated with Air India, they were not responsible for my delay and I would have to rebook. After running back and forth through the deserted terminal and even (out of sheer desperation) trying tearing up and declaring, “But I’m only seventeen, I’m a Minor!” I could elicit no sympathy. At last I conceded and rebooked—for the next morning.

I contacted my mother and let her know, as a friend of hers was supposed to meet me in Seattle. She asked me if I wanted her to contact a friend of hers who lived in LA, who was my sister’s godmother. I told her that it was only eight hours or so, hoping that she would insist. She didn’t, and merely wished me a good night. I said goodbye and hung up so that she wouldn’t hear how my throat was closing and my eyes were filling with tears.

I had a large backpack, a computer bag and a large suitcase. I felt a marrow-deep exhaustion that I’d never experienced before, much less from a plane trip. I saw people sleeping in seats, huddled around their bags to keep them from being stolen in their sleep. The terminal was deadly silent, except for the occasional snort or snore. Occasionally, I would see someone laying on their side with their eyes open, following me as I walked, and I felt terrified. I tried to arrange myself and my bags in a seat to sleep, but my suitcase and backpack were too large for me to keep a hold on them. I could do one or the other, but not both.

The fear mounted with my exhaustion, so I went to the bathroom. I locked myself in the handicapped stall, left my suitcase and backpack against the wall and hung my laptop bag on the hook, and sat on the toilet and tried to sleep. It was by far more comfortable than any location I’d tried before, but every sound of a person entering the bathroom startled me into waking and I wasn’t resting at all.

After half an hour that felt like a day, I gave up and wandered around with my bags until at last, I found an outlet in a hallway with no seats at all. Perching myself on top of the heating vent, I called my mother’s friend in Seattle.

She talked with me for perhaps half an hour or an hour, until my phone was running low on battery (I couldn’t charge it and talk at the same time). I felt safe while I was on the phone, and was terrified to hang up, lest the exhaustion and the terror come rushing back. Fortunately, it didn’t. I plugged in my laptop and wrote stories until the dawn finally arrived and the terminal started groggily coming back to life.

I had a croissant and slept on my flight to Seattle, where I ran into a friend from university and my mother’s friend came to meet me for a scant half hour or so before I had to go back through security to my next flight. I was (somehow) perfectly chipper and energetic by then.

(But on occasion, the thought of flying into LA still fills me with a sort of remembered sense of horror.)