East Coast Travelogue №1: Kicking Off the Voyage with a Jewish Wedding

Not a literal Jewish wedding, but the metaphor for one given the mishaps that opened this long journey.

As promised, this is the first entry in the travelogue outlining my brief return to the homeland and vacation in Ireland. And it begins where many long journeys begin: at the airport. LAX, to be exact.

Now, I’ve been a frequent traveler on the video games conference circuit for almost a whole decade. I could write the ZAGAT guide on major and regional airports of America. (Hear that, travel mags looking for a single female Millennial business traveler who can grab attention?)

And I can duly say that LAX is the Gitmo of American airports.

I stand by those words. Hands down, traveling in or out of LAX is simply one of the most excruciatingly soul-draining experiences one could possibly have when getting ready to endure a couple hours in a tin can disease vector (or preparing to yeet oneself from one).

Before native Angelenos shake their heads and tell my East Coast transplant ass to fly out of Burbank instead: I KNOW BOB HOPE AIRPORT EXISTS, CHAD. I flew in and out of there a couple times, including for the final E3 in 2019. You don’t sit on the 101 waiting to die. It’s a breeze to get there if you’re downtown or in Hollywood. Metrolink and Amtrak trains and buses go right up to it like forest animals to a Disney princess. Bob Hope Airport is an adorable and kitschy little thing where the decor makes you feel like it’s still 1967 and it’s not frantically mobbed like a Wal-Mart on Black Friday like its El Segundo counterpart. A gently smiling entity, just like the beloved actor and comedian for whom it is named.

Unfortunately, a vast majority of the segments I need for both personal and business travel with my preferred carriers all require schlepping to and from the hellmouth known as LAX.

I often tell people that I’m happier with my new home than a monitor lizard surrounded by dead fish and other tasty things they yanked out of the garbage dump. And it’s true! But the only thing I truly loathe about living in LA now is having to rely on the most poorly-designed miserable excuse for long-haul travel that exists.

JFK wasn’t exactly a jaunt to Margaritaville either, but at least it had the AirTrain and more ways to literally get out. LAX traps you in the suckage.

But at the time of writing, I’m finishing up the second leg of this voyage far from the purview of Bob Hope vs. LAX. I’ve got more travelogue planned and know that it’s time to discuss the whole “Jewish wedding” thing for those unfamiliar. Because as the saying goes, history repeats itself.

While this often denotes political corruption and civil unrest reoccurring in cycles, it can apply to one’s personal life easily as well.

And as I geared up for this trip exceeding a month, encompassing a mix of a conference, vacation in Ireland, and seeing old friends and what’s left of my family back on the east coast, the eerie similarities to a previous travel-rich chapter of my life started surfacing.

The last time I took off on a trip of similar length, it was 2017. I did the bucket list vacation (Japan) a few months prior. The second trip was all business, all on the west coast, for a solid month. It was straight up the happiest month of my adult life and I returned to The Bronx a different person. After four years and a pandemic, I wound up moving to Los Angeles after a year of planning, saving money, and realizing that I had almost nothing left in the homeland but plenty waiting for me in California.

And something dubbed “the Jewish wedding principle” applied when I took off for that tour.

If you’re unfamiliar with the trope, it’s from a specific subset of New York Jews of Eastern European ancestry who grew up with it then taught it to their kids. Basically, you WANT everything leading up to the wedding, even the wedding itself, to be an absolute disaster because it means you’re getting all the bad parts over with now and the marriage will be blissful as a result.

The most notable portrayal of this trope in somewhat modern media is with a literal Jewish wedding on Sex and the City, where just about everything leading up to Charlotte’s wedding and the actual ceremony becomes a total disaster.

Welp, that was the lead-up to my 2017 tour. Everything was a disaster getting to my first stop in Vegas, then the trip was more fabulous than I could possibly imagine, for both my conference and personal days.

After a major foot surgery and a too-long pandemic, I’m back on the road and in the sky again. I already planned to slow down the travel after my return in May so I could laser-focus on my business and game dev ventures, but the current public health environment in the US (or complete lack thereof, rather) is only driving that decision home further. So if we get a super variant or some shit, I’m knocking this solo vacation to the Emerald Isle off my bucket list. That mask stays on my face in-flight and every mode of public transit, though I plan on interacting with mountains, amphibians, and reptiles more than people.

But given my track record of Jewish wedding shenanigans and “if nails running down a chalkboard were an airport, it’d be LAX”, I knew the voyage would be epic because I had a comically disastrous kick-off to this long trip:

• My favorite pair of aviator shades fell and broke as I was corralling the suitcases out of my apartment. Oh yeah, it all started before I even got to LAX. And you have to understand why this is catastrophic; I have a narrow head shape plus those jabby AF Slavic cheekbones I didn’t grow into til I was 33. Aviators are the only kind that look good on me, but sunglasses are always too big or too small. These had the perfect fit. Had to make do with my backup pair that slips off my nose, and those banged-up frames are still sitting in my apartment as I write this.
• Traffic on the 110 was horrendous. This is unsurprising, as LA traffic is notoriously awful. But despite allowing 3.5 hours to get there, I actually worried I’d miss boarding. All while I was dehydrated and hungry because it was so damn early, I wasn’t in the mood for food. Seriously, who decided morning people should run the world?! I hate you and want to speak to your manager.
• Have I mentioned yet that LAX is simply the shittiest airport in the world?
• In all my years of traveling for business and pleasure, I literally had never seen Delta’s check-in lines so long — even for Sky Priority and Medallion members. People had poured out onto the sidewalks like a milkshake that would not fit into the glass. Uh…maybe nixing the mask mandate was a BAD IDEA, because I got a feeling that there’s gonna be a lot more gate agents and flight attendants who can’t work in the coming months — oh wait, it’s already happening. Oddly enough, I flew out the day the mandate was repealed but this was the one Jewish wedding inverse I got: my flight was one of the very last ones still subject to the mandate because it was that early in the morning.
• TSA pulled me aside and made this big show of swabbing my freaking HANDS. It was legit the weirdest thing I ever encountered: I’ve had the sensor catch me if I forgot to pull my phone out of my pocket, or I get “randomly selected” for a patdown. But sure. What a smart use of our tax dollars: my hands are a potential terrorist threat, but the virus that killed over a million people isn’t and we can freely spit in each others’ mouths again. And for crying out loud, stop asking me to pull my mask off when you check my ID. I promise you that there aren’t that many fat alternative women from The Bronx who sound like Robert Lozier after a carton of Chesterfields out there, and most probably wouldn’t want to imitate me.
• Upon narrowly evading a TSA groping, I was greeted by the women’s bathroom that had a line rivaling the ones I used to see for Metallica tickets. Do some quick calculus and realize I can either hold it in til I actually get ON the plane, or risk boarding commencement if I wait in line. But then I remember I’m a frequent traveler, and carry a Delta Platinum card that could double as a weapon and now’s the time to use it. Hey, I can get free breakfast in the Admirals’ Lounge too! Bathroom lines don’t exist in that wonderland!
• LOL NOPE. Guess what, THERE’S A HUGE LINE THERE TOO. Seriously, what was going on?! Although we did get some free snacks for being made to wait. For all they knew, I wasn’t allowed up there and could’ve just gotten that bag of C-tier snacks with a bottle of Evian then vamoosed.
• Boarding mostly passes without incident. Use the laughably narrow facilities mid-flight and end up being hit in the head with a runaway toilet paper spindle of all things. It launched like Jeff Bezos’ dick rocket and we hadn’t even hit turbulence or a patch of rough air. After frantically putting the toilet paper back in that thimble-sized Thunderdome, I spend that piss wondering how the hell people could possibly find the idea of the mile high club sexy. Cocaine-fueled jets in the 80s had more room? I was aware this was something I’d laugh about when I recount this story to my friends later, but just like the queues that were hordes rather than lines, it sucks ass to monumental Komodo dragon degrees when it’s happening.
• Like LAX, flying itself is a fairly miserable experience for all involved. And my flight was full of crying babies. Before you tell me what a horrible person I am, I have to state that it’s honestly not the babies that bother me. They’re in distress and can’t help it. Unlike the loud, gropey douchebags in business class who won’t shut up about their football game and can control themselves. Rather, it’s other adults performatively being assholes about it or worse yet, people like the mother sitting in front of me who spent half the flight snapping at her kid for the tiniest things. Including seething at them for crying! Hey, being yelled at by my parents for crying and having to self-soothe most of my life is how I became an incredibly avoidant woman who couldn’t admit she wanted love — different types of it, too — until five years of therapy that began at 31. This is triggering, and y’all suck so hard as parents. Kids aren’t pets, assholes.
• HOW THE HELL DID THAT TOILET SPINDLE HIT ME IN THE HEAD, SERIOUSLY

There were more middle fingers from the world here and there, like how my friend’s car wouldn’t start after she picked me up at the train station after the Raleigh segment. But by and far, the mere act of returning to the East Coast was the rockiest part of all.

But I knew that based on the Jewish wedding principle, the rest of the trip would be incredible and so far it has been.

Next travelogue entry: The Colonization of Raleigh