On my way...

June 7, 2005
Subject: On my way…

Hello everyone-

I'm pretty sure that if you're receiving this, you already knew that I was making a trip to Tokyo this summer. If I somehow neglected to tell you, then hey guess what. Yeah, that. I finished my job at VCA yesterday (happy birthday; a summer break is certainly a nice present!) and started my journey early this morning. No down time for me!
I am currently in the second leg of what you could refer to either as an octopod or two pairs of twins, depending on which you think is the less ridiculous and ill-advised use of metaphor. I'm under no illusion that either is particularly winning or clever, but I think I like the twins thing better because of how my trip is arranged. Two trips of two legs each, and in two directions, making eight flights altogether.
At 6:00 this morning, after nearly missing a flight due to my stupidity (more on that presently), I left Norfolk for Pittsburgh, and I'm now somewhere over that is so flat that my best guess is that it's Ohio. This is the first of the pair of twins that will take me to Asia. I'm currently en route to San Francisco, where I will spend today with my awesome friend Andy, his awesome girlfriend Kirsten, and Kirsten's awesome roommate Lindsey. Andy's family is also awesome, and I'll be staying with them tonight and tomorrow night. I'm actually in their house sending this to them, so my apologies if that's awkward. They live just outside San Francisco in a small-ish Bay Area town called Livermore. Home of Donut Wheel. This is where I spent Spring Break last year. It will be a great time, I'm sure. On Thursday morning, I leave San Francisco for Los Angeles, to make a quick connection and get on my way across the Pacific for Tokyo. Coming back will be the reverse, except that I will connect through Charlotte between California and Norfolk instead of Pittsburgh.
So I got up to my gate at 5:38 this morning, and there were probably 20 or 25 people waiting at the gate. So I assumed they were all waiting for flight #3981 to Pittsburgh. At about 5:50, the man behind the counter got on the speaker and said, "Final call for boarding for flight number thirty-nine eighty-one to Pittsburgh. Waiting for passengers Dean, Blahdeeblah, Walter, and Blahblooblee." (These were the real names of these two, in case you were wondering.) So I hopped over to the counter and said, "Hey! I'm Kent Walter and I'm going to Tokyo!" And then I added "...by way of Pittsburgh." So he let me out onto the tarmac without even scanning the barcode on my boarding pass (which gave me a ton of ideas while I was waiting to take off... The possibilities...) and everything was cool. And there three other people getting on with me, so I'm sure the dirty looks from the other passengers were directed toward them, because I'm much too good-looking and magnetic in my demeanor. :)
I've heard that you can't actually walk on clouds, but as I was looking out the window sometimes down at the occasional glimpses of Penn's Woods but mostly at the hills and valleys of white that looked about six feet away until every now and then when that speck all the way down there showed up and I realized that it was the shadow of our plane, I wondered if this ability has been empirically disproved. (Holy cow, that was one sentence.) They just look so solid. It looked like the green foothills thousands of feet below the clouds had been cloned, lifted, and then bleached out. I love window seats. Especially on an exit row.
I just got up to use the vicious, blood-sucking monstrosity that is an airplane bathroom (flush one and you'll understand) about an hour ago, and I noticed that there is actually a flatter area of the world than Ohio. The captain announced, as the guy on the aisle was doing his best to let me out, that we were somewhere around an area known as Blue Mesa, Kansas. Yeesh. It looked like the world's biggest quilt fresh off the world's biggest ironing board. Flat and segmented into nice little squares. And I think I saw an honest to goodness crop circle. I'm as serious as I am intrigued. So that was a while ago, and about five minutes ago, he came on again and said that we are about eighty miles from Pueblo, Colorado and that we would have great views of the Rocky Mountains to the north and south. The only problem with a view that you're eighty miles from being able to see on a west-bound flight is that it's due west, which is a tough direction to look in through a plane window. But I am a patient lad (more now than ever), and now I am trying to take in the fact that there are snow-covered mountains off to my left at roughly the same latitude as the 92-degree day that temporarily disabled my car just yesterday. Wild.
San Francisco International is great fun to land in. If you haven't done it, I highly recommend it. You fly over the very famous San Francisco Bay, with all its multi-colored inlets and crazy canal-looking things, flying lower and lower on your descent, and then at the last possible second, when you swear you can't be more than a foot away from plunging into a scene from a movie and pulling the red string on the yellow vest and sliding down the yellow wing slide that no one has ever actually seen, you finally see some pavement out the window and everything is safe. It would be kind of ironic, I guess, making it past an entire country and then splashing everyone to their doom ten minutes from the destination. Anyway, I'm on the way across the bridge with Andy and Kirsten right now, and it's very nice to be on the ground and back in San Francisco. I love this place.
OK, in case the incongruous gaps in time and location haven't clued you in, I've written this to you in bits and pieces between pages of my book and stuff and in the middle of a five-hour flight with my computer plugged in to the armrest and my headphones on. Plus the view. Not a bad way to travel. But I'm not sure what kind of time I'll have each day when I'm in Japan, so this could very well be the only book-length e-mail I send. I don't really know. Any of you who used to get my monthly novels know that I'm more than capable of inflicting massive amounts of drivel on you in a short amount of time. Just as in the era of those periodic newsletters, though, I will make no apologies for the length. Especially since I'll be in a place that I'm pretty sure none of you have ever been and you have no excuse not to be interested.
I'm BCCing these e-mails to everyone, but if there's someone else you think I probably am not sending this along to that you know would be patient enough to put up with my rambling and would be interested in some pictures and maybe a video clip or two, let me know. Also, because I'm planning on sending a handful of videos to you in the next couple of weeks, any of you that have dial-up internet or can't handle file attachments up to about 4 MB, please let me know so I don't mess anything up in your e-mail. Microsoft is an awfully big monster to have on your bad side... I'll write again soon with the first of the pictures. Here are Andy and Kirsten to whet your appetite for those. Talk to you soon.

Kent