I'm in Long Beach tonight, and being that I haven't worked out since the evening that I last blogged, I figured I should do both while I am on my fifteen-hour break.

The Holiday Inn in Long Beach does not have a fitness center per se; so they have kindly brokered a deal with the local Jewish Community Center for us to use their facilities.

That. Place. Friggen. Rules.

It had a huge pool, two gymnasiums, a big-ass weight room, martial arts classes, more treadmills than I could count, eliptical machines, free bottled water, and free food from some little girl's bat mitzvah. I wanna be Jewish. They were so nice too! I mean free cake for crying out loud! The Mormons got nothing on the Jews. Free cake! And they partied like it was Passover. Hoo-Haa for the white and blue-ah!

Wow.

So I decided to run a bit tonight. I'm still taking it easy with my leg such as it is, but I figured my goal should be 3 miles. I mean, even the people who don't run can put down three miles. So I ran on one of the hundred treadmills there at the JCC, and once again, at the two and a half mile mark, my hip/right-butt-cheek and knee started up with that pain again (ITBS: read the last entry). I wanted to keep going, but I just couldn't. I have the heart and lungs to go long distances, but just can't keep going. I've got a hitch in my giddy-up; a pain in my ass. Oh well, I suppose I will go and take a nice warm bath and massage it. Quit drooling.

Anyway, the moral of the story:
1) The Jews? Great! I love 'em!
2) Strained knee-to-ass connective band? bad.
3) The Mormons need bat mitzvahs or they are going to be stuck in second place for a long time. Don't scoff at me! It's not my fault that they don't have a right-of-passage with free cake. Not my fault.

I write about my experiences in hotels a lot. This isn't because I am particularly infatuated with the hotel experience; but rather, it is one of the two experiences I have in an average day: the hotel, and the airport. I exist in very few other places. So I have to look hard for the humour in things like the shower head in my room last week in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It had three settings: Stream, Massage, and Tickle. It had a tickle setting. Seriously. I didn't dare try it. What would people think if they heard me laughing hysterically, by myself, in the shower?

That hotel in Fort Wayne isn't particularly nice. In fact, I think it might beat Columbia, South Carolina for worlds worst hotel. I am still worried that I might have gotten scabies from the bed sheets. I'm not being dramatic either. It was nasty.

Now, I don't think I'm being totally fair to the Best Western Luxbury; after all, we did get in at two o'clock in the morning. We were all a little bit grumpy by that point. Not much would have made me happy at 2 am. The simple fact that I knew that I had to be getting up at 7:30 didn't make me happy either. So my review may be slightly tainted.

But consider this, in the morning I went down to the kitchen for breakfast. They had put out what seemed to be a decent breakfast spread. In order from left to right, there were a couple loaves of bread, some bagels, one of those two tiered baskets full of fruit, a toaster, a juice dispenser, a cereal dispenser, a waffle maker, a milk dispenser , a stack of bowls and a rack of condiments. I'm always delighted when a hotel has a selection of things. It put me in almost a good enough mood to go back to the shower and try the tickle setting. But not quite.

So I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes and some milk and grabbed an apple and a banana. I ate my cereal quickly and then I went for my apple. I bit into it with all the devouring strength I had, but my teeth would not penetrate it. It was plastic. Yeah, they totally tricked me. It wasn't a flimsy plastic apple either. This sucker had some weight to it. Sonsabitches. So I picked up the banana and checked it out too. Also plastic. Grrr.

Ok, who does that? Who puts fake food right in the middle of real food?

I had a very long day today. This morning I woke up in Charlotte, North Carolina at 3:55am. My travels took me from Charlotte to Washington DC to Huntsville, Alabama to Washington DC to Cleveland and back to DC again. I knew that today was going to be a long day so last night I hit the sack at about eight o'clock. To my great surprise, I awoke to slamming doors at 11:30pm. I was staying in room 304, and in room 306, the adjoining room to mine, a group of orientals had taken up residence and had decided to yell at each other for at least an hour. This irritated me a fair bit. Ok, I was a little more than irritated.

So this morning, at 3:55am my alarm clock went off. I dragged my rear out of bed. I was way too tired to get up. I flopped back down on the bed and fell asleep again. But the Jack of eight o'clock pm is smarter than the Jack of four o'clock am. That's why at 3:57am my cellphone alarm rang to wake me up. Again, I had been tricked in to believing that someone had called me. Satisfied with that result, I headed over to the shower.

As I rinsed the shampoo from my hair I agonized over how angry my oriental neighbors made me. Even as I dried off, I could not get it out of my head how rude it was of them. As I stood shaving at the sink basin, it finally struck me. Revenge is a bitch. But how could they taste my vengeance? 'Eureka! I've got it!'

I finished packing my things. I pressed my uniform, and put on my tie. I straightened out my wings and made sure that I had my sunglasses handy. After all, the sun would be coming up near the tail-end of my flight to Dulles. I grabbed all of my things and left room 304. I made my way down to the lobby where my Captain and one of my flight attendants had been waiting. After we found our one straggler, we all mounted up and piled into the hotel van. Because it was it was only 4:30am nobody said much. We all just kind of stared blankly forward; none of us extremely happy to be awake. Of the four of us, I was the least happy to be up. One of the flight attendants said to me, "You look like hell." I told her about my experience from the night before. All of them seemed shocked. I guess none of them had door slamming, screaming neighbors last night.

I sat their rocking to the rhythm of the road. I thought back to my shave. That is when I pulled out my phone. I dialed a phone number and pressed send. The Captain looked at me, "Dude, it's 4:30 on the east coast! Who are you calling?" I just looked at him and smiled. The Hotel's concierge answered the phone, "Holiday Inn Airport, how may I help you?" I cleared my throat, "Room 306 please," I replied. He was quick to respond, "One moment sir."

The phone rang several times. Then on the other end of the line came a quiet, "he-rrrr-o?" Roughly translated that means "Hello." "Good morning ma'am, this is your wake up call." Then I hung up the phone.
I looked to my left, the Captain looked at me in disbelief. "That was awesome. You're the man."

Yes Captain, yes I am.

I'm in Bloomington, Illinois this evening. Apparently, the people in the midwest have a difficult time coming up with unique names for their towns. Why? Oh, I don't know, it might be the fact that there is a Bloomington, Indiana only one-hundred and fifty miles away, as the crow flies. Actually, the Bloomington in Indiana is the Bloomington I figured we were going to. Boy was I ever surprised when I found out that I was barely in another state.

Anyway, we got in quite late. It was about 11:30pm and I was hungry. As it turns out, neither the Captain or the Flight Attendant were in the mood for going out. I didn't care. I was going to go and get some food. When I got downstairs, the guy working the front desk asked me where I was going. I told him that I was planning on going to get some food. "Dude, it's almost midnight." "Oh yeah," I said aloud. Then in my head I mused, 'If we were in the good Bloomington, the real Bloomington, there'd be at least a Wendy's or something. Illinois' Bloomington sucks.'

So I made the about face and decided to go back to my room. As I was walking back I spotted a vending machine. Now normally, I would just walk on by, but the last thing I had to eat was a bagel for breakfast in Phoenix this morning at 6:30am. So I marched right over to that vending machine. Nothing looked especially good to me, so I went with the obvious winner: Nibs. Who doesn't like Cherry Nibs for dinner? I'll tell you what, just shoot me if a starving, chubby airline pilot can't eat Nibs for dinner.

Looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching me, I punched in the code for nibs: 2-0. You know, when you get your heart set on something, you probably shouldn't take your eye off the ball. I punched in 2-1. After eighteen hours of starving and flying and frustration, I let out a "Nooooooo!" I even had my hand out stretched. You would have thought I dropped Kevin Costner from a Coast Guard helicopter. What did I get? Friggen Raisinets.

So there you have it. This evening I am in the crappy Bloomington, eating Rasinets, instead of being in the "real" Bloomington eating Nibs. Go Hoosiers!

The Wyndham offers a free continental breakfast. And while I was looking forward to sleeping in on my twenty-two hour layover, I could not let a free breakfast pass me by. This morning I got out of bed at 9:43 (breakfast ends at 10:00), got dressed and proceeded to the dining room.

I grabbed an unripened banana, and a green apple as hard and as green as an emerald. OK, the apple wasn't that green. It was probably green like a peridot, but it was hard. I digress. Anyway, I grabbed some fruit and a bowl of Rice Krispies, and a package of Pop Tarts that were just sitting there in a basket. I sat down at a table facing the television.

This was the point where I started getting a little confused. 'What city am I in? What state?' I honestly didn't know, and I started to worry a little. I didn't lose it though. I just kept eating my food, and watching CNN. 'Well, we're still on the East Coast,' I thought. People in the middle of the country generally watch Fox News. So I just kept eating and watching for clues. Maybe I'd see someone wearing a college football team's shirt or something. Nothing. I gave up on my quest for personal solidarity for a moment and watched CNN.

Apparently, people have forgotten that there is a war going on, because Oprah gaining twenty-five pounds because of thyroid flare up is headline news. Be sure to tune into Oprah's next show to learn how to look for the warning signs and symptoms of an over-active thyroid. Oh, by the way, there are American soldiers being killed right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. No big deal. I digress again! Ah!

So, after the three minute Oprah story and the two second story on a TRAIN THAT DERAILED IN WASHINGTON, I had had enough of television and decided to try to figure out where I was. I went through my routes over the last few days. DC, Raleigh, Someplace, DC, Austin, DC, Roanoke, Chicago, Nashville, Someplace, someplace, someplace. 'Awe hell,' I thought to myself. I really couldn't remember.

So I kindly asked the people next to me, "excuse me, but do you know what city we are in?" The guy just looked at me for a second. I think he thought that I might be retarded. "Uh,Greenville ," he said. He was just a little uneasy. "Oh," I said, "What brings you here?" I didn't want to come across as a total fool, I needed to figure out what state Greenville was in. "My daughter goes to Clemson." AH-HA! We're in South Carolina! I needed to confirm, "That means we're in South Carolina right?!" "That's right," he said, as he got up to leave the dining room.

Awesome. So in case you didn't get that, I'm on a twenty-two hour layover in Greenville, South Carolina. It only took me a half hour to figure out where I was. Go Tigers!