Note: I was already running behind writing today’s post due to the fact that I’m attending (what you might have heard described as) a very spirited national Convention in Philly. And then, on the return trip from the first night’s events, our train ride devolved into an episodic, comedic and occasionally harrowing journey that reminded me of an 80’s era movie with Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer called Into The Night. Our adventure included our being dropped off on an abandoned-looking street corner at the premature termination of a trolley line, surrounded by sketchy, somewhat inebriated-looking observers. Add a passing storm, several misdirections, and a long wait for a hotel shuttle that seemed incapable of locating us, and you have the perfect ingredients for Mr. Trolley Toad’s Wild Ride.
Eventually, the shuttle van did find us, and we made it back to the hotel uninjured, if somewhat unglued. One day perhaps I may be able to sort tonight’s experience into some kind of coherent, wry tale. But for now, I will simply offer a bit of advice to anyone traveling anywhere in Philadelphia after midnight: do not ever get on board Trolley Car 36. Call a cab. Or call Uber. Or rent a car. But never, ever, place one foot onto Trolley Car 36.
Do you have any chaotic, scary or funny travel anecdotes you can share? Anything to get my mind off Trolley Car 36.
Wasn’t the Michelle-Jeff movie Into The Night?
I’m not asking to correct you. I’m asking because I fear, in my old age, my mind is somehow deteriorating?
You are absolutely right, Jim! I just noticed that this morning, and it’s changed now. I got it right in the title, but my brain was so fried that the title had morphed into a darker film by the time I rewrote it in the body of the text. I blame Trolley Car 36 PTSD. ?
One should always blame inanimate objects for mistakes whenever one can.
Trolley rage. I’ll blame anything other than myself!
“Trolley Car 36” sounds (appropriately!) like the title of a Twilight Zone episode. Glad you finally made it to the hotel!
Last summer I missed my exit when trying to get from one interstate to another, and my GPS rerouted me. I got off the highway at an exit leading to a small city that is notoriously crime-ridden, and quickly found myself facing a left or right turn: the right turn led back to the interstate, but the concrete wall ahead of me was tagged in bright red paint with an arrow pointing left. It read, “TURN HERE PLEASE.” I did not.
I wonder about what will happen during those moments when we have self-driving cars, Laura. Guess we’ll find out–thanks for commenting!
Early in my New York days, I was on a subway platform in mid-town late at night.
A gang entered. How did I know it was a gang? They all dressed the same. (Plus I’d recently seen the Walter Hill gang movie, The Warriors, so my imagination was running wild.) They all had white T-shirts and red berets. They looked like they meant business. I started calculating my odds of getting out alive.
The next day I told a long-time resident about my close brush. He informed me that this was actually a group called The Guardian Angels, a recently formed citizen’s group to stop crimes on the subways.
BTW, the greatest night paranoia movie of all time is Martin Scorsese’s AFTER HOURS.
I’ll have to watch that one, Jim. Back then, I heard that the Guardian Angels were “good” guys, if a tad controversial. Like Rick in Casablanca, I might have been misinformed.
I saw some Guardian Angels in the NYC subway just the other day. Spotting them is more of a rarity now, because crime has dropped so much over the past 25 years. Coincidentally, I met their leader, Curtis Sliwa, at the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York. This was just a couple of months after some mobsters tried to kill him in a taxi.
Kathryn, are you writing about the convention? At times like these, I miss journalism so much!
Oh, only in social media forums, from eccentric angles like this post. I didn’t want to go too much into the convention angle because we try to avoid politics here. But it’s interesting, the atmosphere is like a giant family reunion, with plenty of moving and even uplifting moments, intermixed with sporadic kerfuffles that resemble a family quarrel in the behavior by some of the participants. I went to Columbia Journalism School in NY, Mark, started out as a tv field reporter, but discovered I was exquisitely unsuited for the profession. Unfortunately I’d spent a year getting the degree before I learned that lesson. Columbia taught me how to ask pretty good questions and ferret out info, but last night obviously those skills deserted me.
When were you at Columbia? I was in the MFA program there from ’82 to ’84, but I took a course at the J school after I realized I couldn’t make a living as a poet.
A couple of years before you, sounds like! I never had a paid job until after graduation. I quickly discovered that reporters must be aggressive and spend a lot of time looking cool and collected on live tv. Not my thing!
I was born in the Philly suburbs. Philadelphia is great for visiting Sports events, Museum Hopping and Jazz venues (may I recommend Chris’s Jazz Cafe). I didn’t do a lot of driving in Philadelphia until my late 20’s when I worked for a Bindery. Philadelphia was one my routes. Let me just say, get in and out of Philly as quick as you can :-).
My father was born in Philadelphia and was a newsboy at the old Connie Mack stadium. Once he left Philadelphia to enter WW2 , the closest he ever got to returning to Philadelphia was Abington, where his mother (my grandmother) spent her twilight years.
Since moving to Nashville, I do miss Philadelphia. Kind of like a person in a bad relationship, that has a hard time leaving..
One last thing, if you do happen to find yourself in Philly, look for the nearest Philly Cheesesteak joint, get one “provvy wit” (not Cheez Wiz – yuk!), find Interstate 76 and quickly head North out of town toward the “safe” suburbs. DO NOT head Northeast through the City!
Your stories and advice made me laugh out loud, Phil! I felt like an utter idiot for winding up where we did, at the hour we did. The only thing that made the whole thing more absurd was that I was holding a clutch of Bernie, Michelle, and Love Trumps Hate signs from the convention, which functioned as a magnet for unsolicited conversations and questions from curious bystanders. I eventually stashed the signs in a dark corner of a closed dry cleaners.
It’s been quite the Election year so far, lol!
Two weeks ago my wife and I flew to Austin (from Phoenix) to see my son, newly transplanted there with a new job. The fares were obscene, but Delta decides if they allow us to fly three times the distance, triangluating through Salt Lake, they would do it for a fraction of the price. This is like Ruth Chris saying, “if you order the 8 oz steak it’s $42, but if you order the 24 oz steak, we’ll grill it up for you for $18. Yep, makes all kinds of sense.
Anyhow… Arizona is a strange place on so many levels, including the fact that we do NOT go on Daylight Savings time. So our clock relation to other time zones changes twice a year. We’re in Mountain Time, same as Salt Lake. Unless it’s spring/summer, in which case, while remaining on “Mountain Time,” we’re actually on Pacific time.
So when we landed in Salt Lake, with a 4.5 hour layover (part of the discount fun), the flight attendant announced it was 3:30. Curious, that’s the same time as it was back in Phoenix. Which gets confusing (see above). But we just took it for granted — it was 3:30.
So we parked in a concourse cafe, I did some work, my wife never looked up from Facebook. When it was time to head to our 8:13 flight, it was no longer on the reader board. Another fight occuped our gate. Because, of course, the plane did leave at 8:13… AFTER one pushed their watches ahead that one hour difference. Which we didn’t, because the flight attendant announced the wrong time. We get to blame the flight attendant, even though we didn’t double check what seemed odd at the time, and remained lame for the entire layover.
The postscript: there were no more flights to Austin that night. The airport hotels were taking full advantage of trapped travelers (two other flights had been cancelled, so it was a running-with-the-bulls death race to find a room at an airport motel), by charging $175 for a shit-hole room. At least the Delta agent to whom I pleaded my case waived the $200 change fee.
That’s my travel “horror” story. Not all that scary, just embarrassing.
Oh my god, that’s just like one part of my saga I left out (due to sheer exhaustion and inability to write anything coherently last night). The entire time we were on Trolley 36, the conductor kept shouting “34!”. A fellow traveler explained that we might be on 34 or 36, would know for sure when it turned left (or right) after a certain stop. It turned left, which meant it WAS 36, and the 34 bound riders disembarked after much confusion and back and forth trips through the doorways. But we still didn’t know that 36 stopped before our destination after midnight. And it’s possible that we should have taken a train rather than a trolley. I still haven’t figured that part out. Needless to say, I will nail it down as best as possible before venturing out this morning. If I don’t show up for my next post, tell them to look for us somewhere along the Trolley Car 36 line. We will probably be somewhere along there, standing at a corner and waiting for a hotel van that never comes.
Oh, and p.s., during this national convention in Philly, we’re stuck paying $1000.00 per night for an equally s-hole airport hotel room. ???
Man, I can’t top any of these cool tales. Best I can do is finding myself at the end of a long, dusty and rutted dirt road, bordered by alligator-filled canals, somewhere in the Everglades. This was pre-GPS and cell phones so I had no way of calling for help. (I was there scouting book locations and lost my way). The sun was going down so I turned around and tried, like a good Girl Scout, to use it to find my way out. I did, but I ended up damaging the car’s axle in my frantic rush to get out before nightfall. The husband never let me hear the end of this. About the car, I mean.
Alligators? Say no more. The word alone is enough for me to want to avoid Florida as much as possible, at least near any body of water larger than a plastic cup! ?
Once when travelling on to Phoenix from a week-long conference in Santa Fe, I took the Friday evening airport shuttle from the Santa Fe hotel to the Albuquerque airport. It was a cold late-afternoon, and it had been cloudy during the trip down.
As I stepped out of the shuttle, large, silver dollar-sized spots began to flop onto the sidewalk. Before I could get inside, I was drenched.
I found my airline, Continental, checked in, and then went to the cafe where I had, according to the waiter, sopa y tortillas y te. It was raining harder, so I called my wife and my mother to tell them that the rain was pretty severe, but, so far, they had not cancelled the flight. My Aunt Ruby–if you’ve never had an Aunt Ruby, you have lived a woebegone life–happened to be visiting my mother in Phoenix.
My mother later told me that when Aunt Ruby heard that I was going to get on an airplane in a New Mexico storm, she began to pray that I would not. (My Aunt was a woman of powerful, godly prayer.)
So I waited. In our group was an Arizona Senator. When the flight was 15 minutes late, the gate attendant called us passengers over and told us that the plane that would take us to Phoenix was orbiting above the storm, and that it would land at the first opportune moment. We watched. And waited. TWA landed. United landed. Another United. Frontier landed. Another Frontier. Another TWA landed. Another United. But Continental? No. Forty-five minutes after the first gate announcement, the attendant told us that the Continental pilot was overflying Albuquerque and going on to Phoenix. This was long enough ago when airlines actually provided customer service.
So Continental put us up in a nearby hotel for the night. The next morning, we all flew out on a TWA flight, into a beautiful morning sky.
My mother told me that my Aunt Ruby absolutely did not want me flying in bad weather, and she took her concerns straight to Heaven.
Apparently, the storm under the Continental plane was much worse or something than the storm under the rest of the flights.
Great story, Jim! It’s 2:34 in the afternoon now, and so far our main challenges have included a blister, broken shoes, and somehow getting caught up in protests everywhere we go. Some young lady wearing a Bernie pin yelled at me this morning for something, I have no idea what but the heat makes people cranky. Perhaps she saw the convention ticket and decided I didn’t look like a Bernie or Buster. It’s strange, because the tribute and ceremony surrounding him at the convention was actually quite emotional and heart-stirring.
Fun post, Kathryn. Glad you’re in Philly for DNC convention.
I’ve experienced the John Candy/Steve Martin classic – Planes, Trains & Automobiles after I traveled to TX but was heading home to Alaska one December. I kept jumping on any plane heading out–leaping across the country–and felt like FROGGER dodging splat.
Safe travels.
Thanks Jordan! It definitely seems funny in retrospect. I imagine that any impromptu travel involving the state of Alaska would have its moments, as well!
Having been to a few dozen countries I could put out a scary, chaotic, or funny story every week for good long time. I’ll start with funny.
So I’m in India – India being a great country for roll-your-eyes travel stories – and I’m taking a bus from Jabulpur to Kisli. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography, this is in the Madhya Pradesh, smack dab in the middle of India. Jabalpur is city of over a million that you can safely skip, and Kisli is a village in the middle of nowhere. And in India the middle of nowhere is truly nowhere. The one and only reason to visit Kisli is that it is the entry point for Kanha National Park, which is a tiger reserve. This is how I happened to be on that bus.
This bus was not the country’s finest. OTOH it wasn’t its worst, either. Trust me on that. Let me also mention that I was the only non Indian said conveyance. So we’re moseying down the road, stopping here and there, because there are no express buses to the hinterlands. People would get off, others would get on, paying their fare to the conductor. Yes, the bus had a conductor as well as a driver.
At one such dusty spot near a nearly dry creek the bus was forcibly stopped. There were police. They boarded and the melee began. Yelling, screaming, indignation and dramatic body language ensued. I had no clue as to what was going on. And then the cops hauled off both the driver and the conductor. The entire bus and us passengers were left high and dry in the middle of freaking nowhere India.
People got off the bus and milled around, myself included. None of the other passengers seemed concerned. After a few minutes and older gentleman came up to me to explain what was going on as he was the only English speaker on the bus. It turns out the bus company had been alerted to the fact that the driver and conductor were in cahoots against the company, not handing out proper tickets to all customers and pocketing the money for those customers themselves. There had been an undercover officer on the bus who witnessed this, and that’s why the police were waiting. So who was going to drive the bus? Would they send someone else? Well, no. The expectation among the passengers, from many years of experience, is that once at the station the driver and conductor would pay a bribe to the police, and then the police would bring them back to drive the bus. Otherwise we were SOL. It took a good couple of hours, but the police brought them back after some baksheesh exchanged hands. They boarded the bus, went back to their respective positions, and carried on as if the incident had never happened. Just your everyday Indian bus bribery detour.
I’ll leave you with this teaser: I was sitting in the window seat of a fine Boeing product, staring at the gin clear Caribbean from 35K feet. Other passengers were dozing, but I had a drink in my hand and I felt good. The PA started up and the captain, not the first officer, spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a problem with tonight’s flight to Lima.”
Fabulous! How’d it turn out, lol?