Travelogue, Part One

"Wait 'till I talk nonstop about this at the hotel bar for the next 5 days!"

I could never, ever travel for a living. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some reclusive shut-in living in a basement full of comics picking Doritos crumbs out of my beard. I love the 'idea' of travel, and usually once I reach my destination, have a great time.

No, it's the travel itself. Airports have now become what I imagine bus stations to have been like in the 50's and 60's, depressing displays of midwestern douche-nozzles, proudly displaying their super-loud crying infants, or else soul-dead packs of fraternity-raised sales assholes rattling off more cliches than a hundred Jay Lenos. It always seem like such a tragedy that every vacation that begins with such wonderful promise of fun and interest has to begin with a cold awful reminder that 99% of this country is completely intolerable.

AeroCalifornia Airlines, bascially the only game in town if you're flying to middle Baja, is a quirky and slightly frightening airline. Hit hard by 9/11, they've cut back on their free beer policy, their 'meal' policy, and indeed on everything but absolutely neccessary rivets to hold the wings on and enough lighter fluid to make the distance. One of the first things I noticed after boarding was that the overhead luggage compartments seemed to be made out of WOOD. That's right, a modern Airbus jetliner had been pimped out with something Ikea would deem likely to fall apart. Very reassuring...

The other terrifying part of flying to Baja is the other passengers. Loreto, Mexico is primarily a 'sport-fishing' destination. This is great if you love to fish, but pretty terrible unless you find a plane full of leathery, boastful, Jimmy Buffet-loving douchebags anything but awful. If you ever need to find a hundred or so dickwads from San Bernardino County sporting stupid looking straw hats and talking loud enough about Yellowtail and Marlin to drown out plane engines, look no further than each and every flight leaving for the Sea of Cortez.

I have a slight fear of flying. It's not a problem when we're in the air, but during takeoff and landing I get a little jittery. One of the things I use to combat this fear is check out other people on the plane and ask myself how upsetting it would be to the world in general if they died. If the plane seems to have interesting or accomplished people on board, I feel strangely better, at least knowing that this plane crash would get some decent media coverage. Looking around on this flight though terrifies me even more, because I realize that if this plane went down, the world would be BETTER OFF. I start to think that me and my wife's death would be an 'acceptable casualty' in order to rid the world of this bus full of blowhards, homophobes, and right wing shitstains. Unfortunately for the planet, however, the plane stayed in the air and landed without incident.

We land in Loreto, which is a nice little coastal village, have a lovely dinner of Seafood cocktail and shrimp tacos, check in to a local hotel and get some sleep. Tomorrow it's off to Mulege for a blasphemous non-catholic wedding inside an old catholic church.

Ole.