Bear Republic, Conquered.

The first leg of my journey is, for all intents and purposes, complete.

Em and I arrived ahead of schedule in the Bay Area yesterday, and nearly without incident. Nearly. As we approached her intended residence (the home of an old friend similarly transplanted to Oakland), we realized that everyone who lived in the house had a job. And we didn't have a key. Cue to the panic of realizing that we had a dinner date with my resident Bay Area champion, Az, and that we had a car stuffed to bursting with a cat and a great deal of Em's most expensive belongings visible through the windows. The fact of this scenario had not occurred to us along the route; here, though, at the final destination, it suddenly became an acute problem. We had to get these things out of the car before we could relax. It was 4 pm. Our host wasn't to be home until 6:30.

We hemmed. We hawed. We searched around the house for storage spaces. We even tried to break into the house, using a trick my super taught me about certain generic types of front door keys. Then we gave up, and started scheming ways to make the process go faster. Unfortunately, Az was waiting--and hungry--and so we decided that I would go ahead and meet her in the Mission, and that Em would catch up once the things were secured.

Being a fairly competent resident of New York, and a girl who has used public transportation in multiple US states and multiple continents, this seemed a perfectly reasonable proposition. I would take BART to the appropriate stop, get off, and Az would meet me for pre-dinner snacks and cocktails.
I hadn't bargained on BART's particular brand of public transport computing system. I went to the station, walked up to the kiosk with its bright blue touch screen, and thought I was getting an MTA-like program.* I was actually getting an interface similar to that in War Games.¹ The machine was taunting me, and threatening to take 20 of my dollars, which seemed like an exorbitant rate for crossing a bridge into a city I only like because of its residents (who, to be fair, are a significant enough force to convince me that Siberia is awesome, if they so choose). After convincing it that I did not, in fact, want to play a game, or start World War Three, or pay 20 dollars, I sussed out what I was supposed to do. It involved a complicated amount of button pushing, but I made it into the city to meet Az and go to the Mexican place for peach margaritas.

Being the stellar thinker that I am, I did not take any pictures of me and my best friend. Nor did I take any pictures when one of my other best friends joined us. I took like, a thousand pictures of the road, and none of my loved ones in a relaxed setting. So don't ask.

And I didn't really take any pictures of my loved ones today, either, although I think Em is in some of the photos I took in the Ikea when we went there out of delirious boredom. It was a day of delirious, hysterical boredom, but we giggled like idiots and then were able to hang out, finally with Emily's host (of the absent keys), and FE02, who I hadn't seen since his departure from Portland in 2009. There were many hugs, and no photos.

Em and FE02 just dropped me off at the Oakland airport, a full 6 hours before my flight, so that no one had to wake up at 3:30 to get me here. This seemed like a genius plan when I thought I could check in and then nap until 5 or so. Unfortunately, my airline is in league with Satan, and has decided to entirely shut down. There is no one at the desk, and every self-check kiosk is closed until further notice.  I daren't sleep, because I couldn't check in in advance, and only want to get bumped on my own terms.²

An interesting fact about the airport in the middle of the night (and it should be noted that I love airports, especially when I travel alone, in every single circumstance): non-mainstream airlines take over. Right now, in my airline's terminal, no one is speaking English. All of the flights are direct to Mexico. It's like one of those really disorienting dreams where suddenly you're in a familiar place made totally unfamiliar by your own inability to communicate at all. I could reasonably ask where the bathroom is in Spanish, or inquire about the whereabouts of someone's brother, grandmother, or cat, or order a chicken dish with confidence. None of these things would get me any closer to being checked in at my gate, curled up around my backpack preparing to sleep or read The Savage Detectives. None of these things would garner me anything other than strange looks and, perhaps, a concern for my mental health.
So I sit, and I wait, for the kiosks to wake up or a person to arrive behind the counter of my airline. But once that has happened, I'll officially be en route to Seattle, where Summer part Deux will truly begin.³


Notes:
* Say what you will about New York--no really, do, because I will say worse--the MTA's system for providing customers with fare cards that get you where you need to go is straightforward, comprehensible, and almost entirely user-friendly. It's easier to figure out what to do on a New York subway than it is to ride the bus, local rail, or train in 90% of the cities I've been in.
¹ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/. Yeah, that's right. It's Matthew Broderick, and it's before I was born, but that doesn't mean I can't reference it. I'm a hipster. I'm all about nostalgia, especially for things I can only ironically be nostalgic about.
² Those terms involve a free flight voucher. It's worked before, and I won't settle for anything less ever again.
³ It may be Summer part Trois, honestly, if we consider my Summer part Un to be the phase in which I took three courses and rarely slept. I think technically that ought to count.