Tag: travel Page 2 of 6

The Many Choices Observed in Terminal D

If you see something, say something.


On an early Sunday morning, sun rising over the skyline, the airport is a full spectrum of humanity, arrivals and departures, a tide of inspiration. Men and women arriving for their morning shifts, raising the gates on shops, punching in key codes and warming up registers. Some have been here awhile; several shops are empty, music blaring out into the terminal hall while the attendant sits behind a counter, scrolling her phone.

The terminal is a sartorial fantasy. Men wearing Hawaiian shirts, silk dress shirts, pressed oxford shirts, crumpled t-shirts. Hats of every kind: cowboy, trucker, straw, felt, beanie, wrap, hood, webbed, baseball, fedora, driver.

There are college athletes ambling through the lanes in packs, noticeable because of their height, pulling mascot-branded luggage, most often in sweatpants or baggy clothes hanging off their frames, tall socks bunched about their ankles, sliders, headphones—always headphones—eyes looking above and away, but not at you.

The More Things Change

If you look at something five ways, how can it seem different on the sixth?


We return to the sea again and again. This, the sixth year of spending a week in Cherry Grove, this the first year of the new normal, the post-pandemic stranglehold more or less released. Things appear different.

First, our vista: our friends’ condo at the beach’s point changed hands, and after five summers we had to search for a new place. Serendipity being the kind saint that she is, I discovered a colleague owned a place just half a mile away. We are here, oceanside.

Things are physically different. The pier on the north end of the beach is missing a ninety-foot portion of its middle. The end of the pier (or most of it) still stands, stranded in the water, planks reaching out shore-side, waving for help. This damage is almost a year old; last August, Hurricane Isaias swept across this sandy string and took the pier’s belly with it. The dunes on that side of the beach have been clawed away by angry seawater. The beach moved.

Holy City


Somewhere in the finite stretches of our lives, we crossed an invisible threshold and passed into the stage in which we travel with one of our pets. I realized this in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where I stood with our seven-pound chi-weenie on a leash, watching the drive-thru line snake slowly by,

The occasion: a quickly-planned weekend trip to Charleston, one that happened to coincide with Kel’s birthday, but one that was mostly made possible by the clearance of normal weekend events. Late Thursday evening I decided to cash out a small bevy of credit card points and book a hotel room. I hadn’t been to Charleston in years; it had been even longer for Kel and would be the kids’ first trip.

Rapidly-planned trips require an odd sort of coordination. We weren’t going to be there long–checking in Friday evening, taking advantage of everything we could Saturday and Sunday morning, then planning to get home in time to take care of chores and the other business readying for the week ahead. We ought to only plan to do three or four things, tops. We decided we owed it to the kids to book a hotel with an indoor pool. We planned to visit the USS Yorktown, a WWII-era aircraft carrier permanently parked on display. I figured we would do a very short tour of Charleston’s historic downtown (you know, show the kids a place where George Washington slept). We would, no doubt, end up on the beach for a walk.

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