The Vacation: Day One Continued

Day One:  The Waiting is the Hardest Part Continued
The new plane I got on at Dulles was much roomier than the original, particularly as I was in an exit row.
I was sitting between two people, a guy who looked sort of like…I don’t know what he sort of looked like.  He was a guy.
What’s important was that the other person was a young woman.  A pretty young woman named Lisa, who was a very amiable companion, and the two of us spent most of the time spent sitting on the runway and the flight, when we finally got into the air, talking.
Lisa was a pre-med student from Iowa on her way home from a vacation spent visiting friends in New York and DC.
I’m sure that once we parted and she was greeted by her parents she either forgot about me completely or told them about the weird guy next to her who wouldn’t shut up and let her study, but while she was on the plane she was very friendly and perfectly willing to humor me.
By the time we took off it was clear that I was going to miss my connection, though I was hopeful that there might be one more flight out to Michigan.
For Lisa it was just barely possible that she might make her flight, and when she found out where it was (the annoying thing about flying through Minneapolis is that you never know what gate your flight is at until you get there and find it on the monitor), she made a mad dash for her gate.  I hope she made it.
There was a moment on the flight during which I had a brief fantasy about the two of us having to spend the night in Minneapolis and “hooking up,” but I dismissed the notion with a laugh, a laugh that I did my best to keep to myself so that I wouldn’t have to explain what I was laughing about.
Still, it’s only natural, I think, that such a thought would occur to me.  After all, I’ve often complained about how I never manage to have a “random encounter” with someone in places like airplanes, and so the fact that fate seemed to have conspired to get me on that particular plane and made that particular seat the first one available as I moved along
was…yeah, I know, it was retarded.
Still, all things considered, talking to a smart, pretty young woman isn’t a bad way to pass the rime even if it doesn’t lead anywhere, especially considering that for me it never leads anywhere.
I’d missed my connection by about 40 minutes, and so I headed to the ticket counter to find out when I could get the hell out of Minneapolis.  After that, I waited for the shuttle to my motel.
Once I got on the shuttle, a young guy and two pretty young girls, a blonde and a much prettier (and more stacked) brunette got on and sat next to me.
The guy and the blonde chatted the whole way over to the motel, engaging in some vapid, twenty-something banter that was mostly about clubbing.
Listening to the guy – a skinny, bleach-blonde hipster – I found myself thinking “This guy is going to fuck one of or both of these girls tonight.”
I also decided that the guy was a hustler of some kind.  It was the way he always claimed to have some kind of connection to anything and everything that the girls brought up, and the way he presented himself as an “entrepreneur” starting up a “high-tech company,” and talking about all of the places he’d been and all the things he’d done, then downlplaying their significance with false modesty.
Of course, much of my opinion could have been formed on the basis of the fact that he was young, skinny, and, in my mind at least, was likely to get lucky with one or two attractive young women.
Still, he struck me as a glad-handing hustler.
At the airport I’d been given a voucher for food from a pizza place that’s near the motel, but I wasn’t much in the mood for pizza, so I decided to walk over to a nearby Chili’s, as it had been about 13 hours since I’d eaten anything.
(That may be at the heart of my troubles; my mom had asked me, “Will you be hungry when you get here?”  I said, “No, I’ll have plenty of time to get something to eat in Minneapolis.” Lousy jinxes.)
On the way to Chili’s I spotted the hustler and the hot brunette walking somewhere else (the TGI Friday across the street), and the various stresses of the day built up and manifested in such a way that I did something naughty:  I walked over to them and said, “Excuse me, do either of you have a cigarette?”
(On that cliffhanger, I will end this entry, as my shuttle to the airport should be arriving shortly.  Not sure when I’ll get the rest posted, but it shouldn’t be as long as a typical summer hiatus, or even as long as an old-time Saturday morning serial adventure.)