“Travel Eve”

We fly out for Christmas in the morning, which means we’re currently driving to a hotel by our airport. Living where we do, the night-before-travel hotel room is an integral part of the trip. Call it “Travel Eve.”

For those of you (which will be most of you) who haven’t experienced the joys of a rural airport, let me explain.

It would take us almost five hours (or worse, depending on traffic in either city) to get to a “regular” airport. We’re equidistant from BOI & PDX (Boise, Idaho & Portland, Oregon). Regular airports.

Instead, we fly out of Walla Walla, Washington, which is a hopping metropolis compared to our own little farm-town, an hour away, but still only thirty thousand people—-and only if you’re counting the area’s vintners and onion-growers who check their mail in town.

The Walla Walla airport has two flights every day. That’s it, two whole flights. Not a lot of choice on times, and none at all on destination. The flight going outbound leaves at 5am and lands in Seattle at six, giving you time to catch the connection to where you’re actually going. And the inbound flight—-giving you lots of time to transfer from wherever-else—-leaves Seattle after 11pm and gets in after midnight.

Now you may think (as we did, prior to our Mexico-trip in February) that at least there’s no need to arrive super-early for that super-early flight out. There’ll be, what, twenty people on the plane?—-and no other flights of people competing to get through the TSA checkpoint. But here’s what we didn’t count on: Being such a small airport, its staff members play multiple roles in the process of checking in (and checking out) the passengers—-and they undertake those roles serially. From 3am to 4am you can check in, and check your luggage, but you can’t go through security yet. At 4am they close the ticket counter and start ushering people through security.

Let me rewind in case you didn’t catch the vital bit of news for the traveler who arrived at 4:05 because she thought there’d be no reason to hurry. At 4am they close the ticket counter. Which is where you usually expect to hand over your luggage. Now, we’re very good about our carry-ons; I carry just a cross-body purse and Jon doesn’t carry anything at all. But our checked bags are another beast entirely. I can carry my own (that’s one of my rules), but it’s bulky, and full of things like dive gear. And now (not understanding in the least how this was going to play out) we had to take those bags through the security check-point with us. We said goodbye to two lovely dive knives (they gave us the option of running back out to the car with them—-but by this time it actually was getting close to Go Time, and I didn’t want to fuck around.) Then they “gate-checked” the bags (like they do with kids’ strollers)—-and we sent up a prayer, as we jogged along to the plane, that we would, in fact, see them again at the end of the day. One of many times in life that prayer has been proven to work.

So now we know that we really do need to show up that early, even though there will only be fifteen or twenty-five other passengers there. Five o’clock flight means three o’clock check-in, which means 2:30 wake-up, if we’re going to get some coffee into our systems first. You begin to see why we stay at a hotel by the airport. As small-time as this is, we live another hour farther out in the sticks.

We have this “Travel Eve” thing down to a routine. We have a little gym bag we take into the hotel with toothbrushes and phone cords, and then tuck those last things into the suitcase in the morning. When we check in, we ask for extra coffee bags for the room, so we can make several cups in quick succession when we wake up. Tomorrow we’ll tuck those last things into the suitcase, and drive the quarter mile to the airport, and get underway on our Christmas visit!