Eastward Part 1: An Accidental Afternoon

Our vacation began, as you can probably guess, with a hangover, three hours of sleep between the two of us, and one rather large mishap. We made the best of it, though.

The shuttle came for us at 3:50AM. We'd been awake for about 20 minutes, horrified to find ourselves still drunk and in the early stages of hung over. We sloppily finished packing (forgetting items like toothbrushes, of course), dressed (also sloppily), staggered outside, and, zombie-like, handed our suitcases to the driver.

When the driver dropped us off at the airport, he asked, "where are you going?"

"DC," one of us mumbled.

His smile twisted into a grimace. He shivered and spat, "I hate that city. A hellhole. Absolute worst place in the world." Then we tipped him, and he wished us a good trip to said hellhole.

No restaurants were open in the airport, M. was surly, and everything befuddled us. Yet somehow, we managed to maneuver through the lines, find coffee, and board our plane for Salt Lake City. I hate flying, but this flight was genuinely pleasant. There was nary a jot of turbulence; the sky was vast and clear. The long, slow descent into the airport, over the lake with all its salt and botulism, was like landing on another planet. In a good way.

Hungry and with some time to kill, we sat down for some pizza and a beer. Unfortunately, our exhaustion was such that we saw no problem with watching the clock on M.'s laptop, still stuck in Pacific time. So we missed our connecting flight. It turned out that the next plane for DC was leaving in seven hours.

But as I said, we made the most of it. At an airport bar, we downed several of these beers before deciding to take advantage of a free tour of the Temple Square courtesy of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the Mormon Church. A kindly old couple drove us there, telling us about their time as missionaries in Pakistan many decades ago. They dropped us off in front of the Temple Square, where our tour guides, two awkward, nauseatingly friendly twenty-year-old girls dressed like latter-day Puritans, met us and introduced themselves. One of them was East Asian and spoke very limited English. The other was gangly, long-haired, and slightly bucktoothed--a prototypical American country girl.

"So, you're traveling together?" she asked.

"Yes."

"How nice! Are you friends, or are you brother and sister?"

We looked at each other. "I guess we are friends."

It was a short guided tour past dioramas and through the Tabernacle Choir space, but above all it was evangelism. We sat in a room that was like a planetarium where a gigantic white Jesus statue boomed, from a speaker somewhere, that he is the center of the Universe. As we walked around, the tour guides got their evangelism on, hard-core.

"Do you have a Book of Mormon?" one girl asked M.

"I probably have one somewhere," he said. "My dad's side of the family is Mormon."

"Have you read it?"

"I've looked at it."

"Well, promise me you'll read it, and then you'll see that it contains truth."

We actually did want to see the house of Brigham Young, M.'s ancestor, as well as the genealogy library, but there was no time. We went back to the street, where a van picked us up, along with a lesbian couple. They looked shellshocked, and were.

We introduced ourselves, and it turned out that, remarkably, they came from our city. From our very own neighborhood. In fact, they lived on our street, only a few blocks away.

"This shit is scary," the chubby one whispered, all wide-eyed. "We couldn't stand it. We went to the closest bar. It was in a hotel. We had drink quotas." She seemed legitimately surprised and horrified, like someone who walked into an ice cream store and found instead the Heart of Darkness. Did they not know where they were? M. and I had every expectation of being evangelized to. That girl was not the world's brightest bulb, but her girlfriend seemed all right.

At the airport we sat down for another meal and a beer, and, believe it or not, we almost missed our flight again. But the airline bent their rules for us, and soon we were on our way to DC.