Reentering the United States is always rough. It was particularly so returning from the first vacation I’ve taken in years. I don’t think people who rarely leave the United States really get how inhospitable the US can be for new arrivals. The airports are mostly dated, confusing, and understaffed¹ and given how suspicious border control has been to me on occasion I can only imagine what it’s like if you don’t have a US Passport and a decidedly pale skin tone.

I landed in Dallas with my father to transfer for a flight to Los Angeles and not only had to go through passport control but had to pick up our checked luggage, walk for about 30 seconds to the other side of customs, then drop it off again² before going back through security.³

As someone who travels far more frequently than they have any right to, I’ve become highly attuned to the nuances of arrivals. Departures can be a little rough, but you’re usually rested and often leaving someplace you know pretty well.⁴ The actual travel might be delightful⁵ or miserable⁶ but you’re rarely presented with complicated choices to make.

Arrivals are a whole other thing. You’re as often as not turning up someplace you’re unfamiliar with, sometimes in a country which speaks a whole other language,⁷ tired and/or jetlagged, loaded down with luggage, and looking to collapse somewhere safe. I always tried to meet people at the airport when they were coming to visit me; flying is traumatic enough with making them roll off a plane and immediately figure out some unfamiliar train or bus or subway map.

I’m perennially embarrassed by how the United States welcomes those from abroad. The infrastructure is crumbling, starved for investment and overrun by chintzy public/private partnerships that plasters everything with advertising.⁸ When I landed at JFK I had to take a shuttle to the parking lot where ride share services were permitted to pick up passengers because the infrastructure was botched so badly. And the severe lack of public transit has resulted in dismal connections to city centers which is what makes hopping a cab so attractive in the first place.⁹

But that’s all part and parcel with the malaise the United States seems to find itself in, these days. The country isn’t young anymore. It’s aging, creaky and prone to rattling on about immigrants. It’s odd to say the EU, with many of its constituent parts older by millennia than the US, has been feeling younger and more vibrant to me. But it at least feels like they’re happy to have a tourist visit.

I was in Southern California for Thanksgiving, visiting family. I grew up in Ohio and lived most of my adult life in Columbus, Chicago, or New York City; it’s fair to say my vibe is East Coast, not West. I regard California’s lack of weather as a gimmick, and what culture there is is broadly represented by Hollywood, both in the flesh and on the screen.¹⁰

Traveling with family for me means traveling with my niece and nephew. And if you’ve traveled with small kids, you’ll know your vacation is entirely about traveling with small kids. You eat when they’re hungry and you always have cartoons on the TV and you visit tourist attractions they’re interested in seeing,¹¹ and then you watch them refuse to eat the food and argue about what to watch and try and wheedle more time playing arcade games.¹²

My niece and nephew are four and seven years old respectively. I got to spend a week with them this trip, which is the longest I’ve been in their company.¹³ I can report that Charlie, my nephew, is a huge fan of pancakes and giant cinnamon rolls and Nora, my niece, prefers grilled cheese.¹⁴ Both like swimming, or at least splashing, so the week was largely spent by pools and beaches and hot tubs.¹⁵

My brother rented a huge minivan and I ended up jammed in the back with my father most of the trip. We got picked up the morning after we arrived near LAX and headed north for a few days near Santa Barbara before heading back down to Newport Beach. We played minigolf in Santa Barbara¹⁶ and went ice skating in Newport Beach,¹⁷ all under warm weather and sunny skies more suited for early September in New York City. And three hour holiday car trips might have sparked some nostalgia, but it wasn’t comfortable and Nora gets violently nauseous after being in a car for more than ten minutes, so we spent a lot of time with the windows rolled down being buffeted by the wind.¹⁸

So it’s not the Thanksgiving I grew up having, but we did end up having a proper home-cooked meal at my brother-in-law’s,¹⁹ and it had the requisite turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes so I can’t complain.²⁰ And being the weird uncle affords me the privilege of dropping in and spending time with the kids then, mercifully, jetting off somewhere when I can recover.

I’m writing on what was, at least initially, a rather bouncy flight back to New York.²¹ There’s an unused ticket from Los Angeles to Vancouver that’s as far as I got into planning the month I was expecting to be in Canada; instead I’m returning to spend the month in New York City with a few forays to visit friends in the Northeast.

My idea, to the extent I have one, is that this is going to give me a chance to recalibrate after my catastrophic health emergency. Immediately after the heart attack I was in emergency mode. After that I was immediately in the heart of the last big trip I had planned to Antarctica, and after flights to New York then Buenos Aires then Los Angeles then back to New York I’m kind of burnt out on travel for a bit.²²

This time in New York is intended to give me time to stop and rethink. My recent health issues mean I can’t plan itineraries as aggressively as I used to, I can’t be as cavalier about running out of medications as I used to be, and I need to start seriously thinking about my physical capabilities in ways I’ve never had to before.²³

I don’t know what that means yet. And it’s going to take a lot longer to figure out than a month. But I’ve got to start somewhere.

Next: Antarctica Day, 2023, New York City
Prev: Ushuaia (USH) to Los Angeles (LAX)

Footnotes

¹ It was about a half-hour walk from the arrival gate to the luggage pickup at Dallas/Fort Worth, and while there was supposed to be a wheelchair waiting for my father I didn’t see any signs of it.

² I had checked it mistakenly thinking it would be checked all the way through to our final destination. We had a relatively tight connection to make and I was trying to eliminate potential problems, to no avail.

³ The TSA is still making everyone take off their shoes which I had somehow forgotten since I have TSA PreCheck and have generally managed to avoid most of that. But I couldn’t use it since my father doesn’t have it. Somewhere in the whole security process my father managed to lose both phone and iPad and they’re probably gone for good.

⁴ The simple fact that you’re departing means you’ve spent at least some time there.

⁵ Say, a cruise ship

⁶ Like an 11-hour flight

⁷ It’s not merely the language everyone’s speaking, it’s the set of cultural idioms which make public spaces navigable. One of the things that made Penn Station such a horrible place was there was no central authority responsible for the signs. The Port Authority was responsible for the signs in their part and Amtrak was responsible for the signs in their part and they refused to collaborate on design standards or even what information belonged on them. It was a nightmare for everyone except students of urban planning, who would treat it kind of like a haunted house.

⁸ Both DFW and LAX feel halfway like a mall circa the mid-80s, with most of the negatives that implies and none of the positives. They’re impersonal and overrun with pricey fast food options. They aren’t places I’d want to be for more than five minutes, let alone places I’m happy to sit through a coupe hours delay for a connecting flight.

⁹ I’ve traveled with many a US citizen who boggled when they first exited a European airport directly to a train running underneath the terminal.

¹⁰ White southern Californian culture, at least. Hollywood’s lens overstates whiteness and obscures dozens of vibrant subcultures, but those were the waters I was swimming in.

¹¹ Mostly the ones with swingsets or kiddie rides or water features to splash around in.

¹² I don’t know if you’ve been in an arcade for kids recently in the United States, but they’re worse than Vegas at this point. Most of the machines have some quasi-skill element to them but most have some kind of jackpot mechanic where you can win tickets to be exchanged later for cheap crap.

The same people who have been designing slot machines to exploit gambling addictions have sat down and done the identical thing for kids. I’m sure it’s healthy.

¹³ I did spend a weekend with Charlie helping clean out my father’s house, so I was slightly accustomed to some of their quirks.

¹⁴ Although neither will eat more than a tiny portion of food, leaving a massive plate of chopped up leftovers. At the airport Nora was delighted to get a doughnut covered in chocolate sprinkles as a treat and happily licked all the chocolate off before handing the denuded item back.

¹⁵ Charlie does like being read to, but for some unfathomable reason has decided their favorite book in the whole world is a very in-depth instructional guide for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess — a game Charlie has never played, by the way, being more of the Breath of the Wild generation — so I got to hear my sister-in-law patiently recite how to beat Fyrus and Armogohma.

¹⁶ Well, sort of. Charlie’s technique involves grasping your putter with one hand on the handle and one close to the head and kind of shoving the ball down the green, then charging after it and trying to speed run the course by pushing it into the hole when it rolls past. Nora got bored after the second hole and decided to run around the course instead. My brother and I discussed my recent heart attack. Nobody kept score.

¹⁷ It sounded too much like exercise to me, so I abstained.

¹⁸ For whatever reason Nora adamantly refuses to take anti-nausea medication, as well as refusing to clean themselves up once they’ve puked all over their clothing. I’m not sure I’m going to give a four year old credit for coming up with a pint-sized version of the IRA’s dirty protest, but I’m not entirely convinced that’s not what’s going on, either.

¹⁹ Technically my sister-in-law’s brother.

²⁰ Granted, I didn’t eat any of the turkey or gravy because I’m vegetarian and I cut way back on the mashed potatoes because I’m trying to be health-conscious. But I did end up having a serving of the enchaladas, so I don’t know how well I did overall.

²¹ One of the unexpected side effects of the cornucopia of medications I’m now on is that the beta blockers have fucked with my experience of turbulence, mostly for the better. I hate turbulence and it’s typically caused me a lot of anxiety, so much so that I’ve had a prescription for it for over 20 years. Since I’ve been traveling, it’s been a pain in ass to fill; doctors who happily write three month prescriptions for blood pressure or acne or arthritis meds shrink from providing even a single refill for Xanax even though 30 pills will last me for six months. So I typically do without.

Now that I’m on industrial-strength major beta blockers every day, whenever we hit a patch of rough air my brain does its typical five-alarm fire routine but my heart rate barely ticks up. It’s like the fire fighters all went on strike. My brain’s convinced it needs to be in panic mode — that’s still not great — but at least I’m no longer sweating and trying not to hyperventilate.

²² For all the flying I do, I really do put effort into avoiding long haul flights and prioritizing trains and buses for short hops when possible. This latest set of travel has been really unfortunate, and I’m starting to look forward to the day when having residency in the EU means I’m not going to get chased out quite so often.

²³ When I first arrived at my hotel in London after my heart attack, I discovered my room was booked up three flights of stairs. I was fine for the first two. I sat down for 15 minutes and let my heart calm down before I attempted the third.