The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 4

Once the terrain began to change from flat to featured, it changed rapidly. I found myself looking down on mountain tops. Looking up at the peaks of a western mountain range from below agitates the imagination. What is the view from top? How far would I be able to see? The mountains from 30,000 feet above them looked unexpectedly friendly, inviting almost. On the ground, the next vista is hidden and tantalizing, demanding effort to get there but from the plane it's just a few seconds away. The mystery of what's over the next hill is solved almost immediately, almost too easily.

Washington.

The descent into  Phoenix , where I was to change planes, revealed some the detail I had been straining to make out from cruising altitude. Closer to the ground though meant that the view was changing more rapidly until finally it disappeared altogether as we flew over the outskirts of the city. Once on the ground, America West would hand me off to something called Mesa West for the one hour final leg to Long Beach  Municipal Airport.  According to the schedule I would have about  90 minutes between planes to get a drink and enjoy the sandwich I had bought in Washington. I was wrong on so many levels.

Traffic at the Phoenix airport seemed gridlocked as we waited to cross a runway until what seemed like several dozen planes landed. Not waiting would have resulted in our being the lead story on the eleven o'clock news (10:00 PM Pacific Time) and that didn't seem like a particularly good thing especially since I knew I wouldn't get to see it. So,  I was content to wait…and wait…and wait…  Finally, a break in the flow and we 'darted' across the main drag onto a taxiway where we again came to a stop, this time consuming another 15 minutes of my sandwich time. Guessing that this delay was due to no available gates, I imagined the airport equivalent of the Christmas time mall parking buzzard, cruising the lanes of the parking  lot, watching for signs of an imminent opening, going into hover mode when one appears.

Once inside the terminal I had only about 20 minutes until my flight began boarding. That left just enough time to grab a fifty cent drink for which I was charged three times that. By the time I got to the gate the flight was already boarding and I had just enough time to discover that I would have been better off checking my sandwich through so the airline would have had the opportunity to loose it for me.

Other than the 30 yard stroll through the pizza oven they called a passenger walkway to the commuter plane and the fact that the seats on the commuter plane were padded with a single layer of 'Charmin' the next to last leg of my trip was uneventful. We landed at Long Beach more or less on time and the luggage appeared on the carousel so quickly nobody even had a chance to gripe about how long it was taking. In fact, the Long Beach airport terminal was small enough that I could peek around the edge of the outdoor carousel and see the luggage actually coming off the plane.

A short luggage lug across the street to the Enterprise Car Rental office where my reservation was actually in their computer at the correct price and I was on my way. The final leg would be my introduction to driving in California, an hour and a half of trying to survive on a series of roads, all of which were referred to as "The" as in "The 15" and "The 415" and so on. More on my puzzlement at that colloquial nomenclature later...