Nearly to a person, people are surprised to hear that, until a few weeks ago, I'd never left this country. I suspect their surprise emanates not from my worldly air—which consists primarily of being able to say s'il vous plait and smelling of garlic now and again—but, rather, from the fact that most toddlers have traveled more than me. Even my own girlfriend sometimes forgot. 'But you've been to Canada, right?' she'd ask.
So after 50 years without so much as tapping a toe on a border, I thought, why start small? No intracontinental travel for me! I began with St. Petersburg, Russia. The traveling, however, underscored why I haven't attempted such a long trip before: I don't travel well. My bags (the one wheely piece not withstanding) are too heavy and I'm too cheap or too proud to pop for those carts at the airport; I don't sleep well on the plane when a big guy next to me keeps expanding into my space like the Pillsbury Doughboy on a yeast bender; and I can't get used to airline vegetarian breakfasts—most recently, a bed of shredded carrots with slices of green peppers. What's wrong with cold cereal? Oh—and that's another thing: traveling brings out the complainer within. With a vengeance.
And this trip was a lollapalooza: I came close to riding in one of those wee-ooh, wee-ooh, wee-ooh ambulances in Paris. Waiting for my flight to St. Petersburg, I started feeling unwell. Was it the warm temperature in the terminal? The lack of sleep on the flight from New York? The cigarette smoke whirling overhead? The man hawking a loogie into the ashtray in front of me? Whatever it was, I felt lightheaded and knew I needed to lie down. I went to the little police station in the terminal and tried to convey my needs, but somehow Miss Kaufman had failed to teach 'cold sweat' and 'pass out' in high school French class, and monsieur le policeman's English was a little lacking as well. After he suggested I book a hotel room if I was sleepy or go to the doctor several terminals away, I managed to convey the urgency of my situation by dropping my backpack on the floor and collapsing on a bench in the corner, oblivious to the stares of the gendarmes coming and going. Ultimately, my fear-of-French-hospitals enacted a speedy recovery, and I managed to drag myself to a spot near a door where I could get some cool, fresh air. Finally, when I got to my room at the hotel in Russia, I promptly got a nosebleed from, like, 12 hours in dry airplanes.
And none of this was made better by the fact that I would have to do the whole thing over again in reverse in two weeks. The return trip home would have been absolutely fine, though but for an incident in, again, the Paris airport, or Sharl DeGaul, as it's known by Francophones everywhere. This time, sent scurrying to the wrong terminal and back again, I managed to misplace my baggage tags. Since no one so much as glances at these when you claim up your luggage at the end of the flight, you wouldn't think this would be a problem. But they apparently scan the bar code on your tags when you check in, which then have to match the luggage being loaded into the plane. Since I had no tags to scan, I was Highly Suspect in our age of heightened security, and for a while, I thought I might be living out the rest of my days on croissants and water: they wouldn't let me on the plane until I'd explained, to at least four or five people, what'd happened and then identified in person my battered Samsonite and box of Russian souvenirs.
Perhaps these unpleasant bookends to my trip made my time in St. Petersburg seem all that much the better (more on that in a future column), but I'm pretty sure no one will ask me to do a TV travel show any time soon—unless they need an episode on packing a car for a weekend in Michigan.
yvonne@yvonnezipter.com