"This is your captain speaking, we are showing an error message on our
number two engine, and we're going to try shutting it down and
re-starting, we hope that will clear it up"
Hope? Jesus! The effect of
the double rum and kahlua I had at the airport bar was wearing off too
soon.
Sure, when I get an error message on my computer, I don't
hesitate to restart in hopes that it will clear up. Then again, I don't
count on my computer to safely carry me a couple thousand miles, 37,000
feet in the air.
We were on our way to the closing party for the Kahiki,
and other than a bad engine and our flight being an hour late, it was
going well. They began serving drinks, and I took full advantage. The
scenery from that high was pretty bleak. The view was made up of huge
expanses of brown nothing, broken only by roads to more nothing,
eventually twisting away and drying up like earthworms after a rain
storm. I looked out under the wing, and my thoughts drifted.
My first
time on an airplane, I was just a kid. I had the window seat, and I
remember being fascinated by the way the jet exhaust made the landscape
seem liquid. Well, up to the point when the engine burst into flames and
they shut it down. My mom chugged her cocktail, my cousin assured us
that we could fly with one engine, and I said something like, "That was
cool!".
Ah, youth.
But today's plane ride was less exciting. Our engine
re-started, and we arrived in Columbus with no further problems. We
slept, we ate, we saw the sights. At one point, as we wandered through a
"story book" park down town by the river, a magic gnome tried to reveal
to us some secrets of this mystical garden, but as we got closer, it
turned out to be a drunken midget shouting "You gotta start over there
to read the f**king story right" then he ran after some other tourists,
shouting "Gimmie a dollar!".
So, figuring we probably weren't
going to get three wishes, we headed back to the hotel, where we began
getting ready. We caught a taxi to the evenings festivities, and stepped
into line as cameras rolled, and flash bulbs popped. We were greeted
and presented with leis, and then with a nod of respect to the flame
crowned giant Moai, we crossed the bridge into the indoor evening of the
Kahiki. From that point on, hours seemed like minutes as they whirled
by in a haze of Cocktails, Music, Food and Friends, old and new, some of
which I was meeting in-person for the first time, but all of which were
top notch. The next morning as I sipped my hotel coffee from a souvenir
Tiki Mug, I mused over our time at the Kahiki, and decided that if that
gnome had indeed been magic, I would have wished for the night we just
had.
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