Leaving on a Jet Plane to the Baltics’

July 28th, Santa Cruz to S.F.O. to Frankfurt and onto Vilnius Lithuania,

There is a Wharf to Wharf run between Santa Cruz and Capitola today and I suggest we leave our house to catch the Highway 17 bus 45 minutes early. Chuck arrives early but I am often overly neurotic about scheduling and Art tells us we will leave in 15 minutes. We lock the front door 30 minutes ahead of time. After loading our luggage in the prius, the key fob to the ignition dies. Chuck quickly jogs to his house to borrow his mother’s sedan. In the interim, I try to open the back prius hatch and it is frozen in the locked position. For a panicky minute, I am afraid that our luggage is locked inside of our car and imagine needing to call a locksmith and ultimately missing our flight.  Art struggles to remove our bags over the rear seats and he tosses them into the back seat of Chuck’s idling car. (Strangely enough, the fob to the back hatch of his car is also not working.) Ten minutes gone but we should still be O.K. time wise. That is until we reach Soquel and the traffic is bumper to bumper. My adrenaline surges and Art instructs Chuck to turn around and take the Park onramp to the freeway. Wrong decision! Chuck quickly makes a second aggressive U-turn and we move painfully slowly along Soquel. We will likely miss the bus at the Pasatiempo stop and the backup plan now is that Chuck drives us over Highway 17 to the San Jose Diridon train station. Chuck careens along, taking a few back street short cuts and when traffic clears, speeds along the freeway. He takes the Pasatiempo off ramp and Art hops out to check the time table printed on the sign. We look up to see the bus pulling in behind us.  We haul our suitcases from the back seat of Chuck’s car and board the bus with 20 seconds to spare!  The air conditioned express bus is cool and we chat with a man about our age also going to the S.F.O. airport and traveling to France. 

I use the bathroom at the Diridon station and listen anxiously to the paranoid monologue coming from a woman in the adjoining stall.  Exiting I take a photo of the old school neon lit news stand and an intimidating young man growls “you’ve got to be kidding,” as he brushes past me.  The adventure begins!

This commute train takes us past the back side of many of the affluent Silicon Valley cities along the peninsula. The train stops at all of them; Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Burlingame etc. Being Sunday, there is plenty of room on the train and I relax into travel/vacation mode. We get off at Millbrae and Art feeds money into the BART ticket kiosk and after several tries, two $5 tickets spit from the machine. We are at the S.F.O. airport in less than 10 minutes with ample time to check in and go through security. After eating mediocre and overpriced Vietnamese noodle bowls we play the waiting game at our United Gate. Art will turn 67 somewhere over the Atlantic and I promise him a German Birthday Beer during our layover in Frankfurt Germany.

After boarding I check my phone one last time and receive a text from my friend Dorothy in Southern California asking if I am O.K? She is watching the unfolding news of an active shooter at the Gilroy Garlic Festival and knows that I always do the festival. I quickly check the news on my phone and am horrified to see what is unfolding. I text a friend who is always represented at the festival. She is not personally at the show and has not yet heard about the shooter but within a minute she texts me back and tells me that Rhona is on the ground at their booth taking cover. The P.A. announces again that all phones must be turned off and I anxiously follow instructions and our plane lifts off. 

I applied and was accepted to this years Garlic Festival but one morning in late June, Alisha comes to work and tells me that she has made a huge scheduling mistake. Her brother in law is getting married in Mendocino and her whole family is attending. Molly will be the flower girl and little Sterling will be the ring bearer. I have a very even disposition but I am angry with Alisha for making this scheduling mistake. Applying for shows is considerable work and this year I was categorized as a commercial vendor which doubled the entry fee for an already expensive show. I made many phone calls to have my work re-evaluated and was eventually put back in the craft category.  Because I cannot do the festival without Alisha’s and Molly’s help, I called and canceled the show This was awkward and embarrassing for me. The following week, I begin planning for a trip to the Baltics’ and to Russia.  

The onboard meal is awful and I rinse it down with two glasses of generic red wine. I am anxious to know more about the shooter at the Garlic Festival and worried about my friends but must turn off my phone. Two movies and half an Ambien make  the 11 hour flight between S.F.O.  painless enough.

Monday, July 29, 2019.

As soon as we touch-down in Frankfurt, I turn my phone back on and am flooded with messages from concerned friends, thinking that I had a booth at the Garlic Festival. I spend much of our 5 hour layover anxiously communicating with friends.  Art has turned 67 in the air but today is his actual birthday. We find a German restaurant, share a wiener schnitzel and have an Aperol Spritz toast to his birthday before boarding our Lufthansa flight to Vilnius, Lithuania.

We land in Vilnius at midnight; our taxi pick up from the airport to our hotel is holding up a sign printed with my name. 15 minutes later we are deposited at the three-star Rinno Hotel on a cobblestone back street of the Old Town. Our reservations are in order and we wheel our suitcases to our spacious first floor room. When we open our door we feel as if we may be starring in the film Bad times at the El Royal Hotel. The room is decorated in brown with old world furnishing and floor to ceiling windows opening onto a leaf strewn courtyard. The room is fine but odd and Art ponders if there is one way glass?  The cavernous bathroom is intended to be luxurious with a huge soaking tub, bidet and heated towel racks, but all feels a little surreal at 1:00 A.M. in the morning.

Our bathroom at Hotel Rinno, Vilnius, Lithuania

Old world decor, Hotel Rinno