Husband, Gary, and I recently got back from our ten-day trip to England, which was a total blast. I am working on sorting out all the pics and videos I took so I can create a trip log as a memory for myself, and I'll share that here.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to get my sleep schedule back on track with local time, which is seven hours behind England. For some reason, it was a little easier this time to adjust to Greenwich Mean Time than it has been to come home. It's been four days and I am still falling asleep before 9pm and waking up at 4am. I'm not totally opposed to this as I love having quiet, contemplative mornings before getting ready for work (which, yes, has started again); my body has also decided I'm a morning person now as I advance in age, so this is fine. What happens after 9pm that I care about anyway? Yes, I'll be the senior citizen who eats dinner by 5pm and is lights out before the young people are even ready to hit the town. I've earned it.
I love my bed. My Layla mattress and adjustable frame is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. This morning, however, I woke up at 3:30am, surprisingly tense, and realized that my brain had been rehashing my most embarrassing moment--again!--and that sleep would now be impossible. I got up, went downstairs, and tried to relax with a couple political commentary YouTube videos and by playing the piano (which is electric, so I can use headphones to not disturb anyone). Even still I found myself squirming with embarrassment.
Husband is also not adjusted to local time, so he came downstairs about an hour later to get his morning drink. I told him my brain had been rehashing my most embarrassing moment, and I was surprised to find I had never told him about it given that this is a memory I have had to relive in excruciating detail for the past thirty years. After I recounted it, he had a big laugh. "That's an awesome story!" he said. "That's the other guy's best story to tell other people!" and he chuckled all the way back upstairs.
I don't know if it's an awesome story, but I did have the thought that if I get it out here, maybe my brain can give me some rest on the subject. You be the judge on the awesomeness factor.
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In December of 1990, I was a college freshman living in the dorms at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I was nineteen years old, so I was still pretty stupid. Cute, maybe, but stupid.
I had to leave campus for Christmas break as we were not allowed to stay in the dorms, and I didn't have any relatives or friends that lived nearby who could put me up. My parents had been paying my tuition and housing, but they were not overly wealthy. I didn't have a job, so it was up to them to find me a plane ticket home.
My mom found a deal called Companion Tickets. I think it was a discounted set of tickets that required two people to split the cost or something, but it was much more affordable than a single ticket. There was another guy from Minnesota living in my dorms, so I approached him about buying the other ticket, which he and his family agreed to. I didn't know the guy well, and I can't even remember his name anymore, and I'm not sure if that makes this better or worse.
One of my friends from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Joseph, happened to be visiting his cousin in Salt Lake City at that time. Joseph and his cousin (and I can't remember his cousin's name, either, which is infinitely worse!) agreed to come and pick me up from BYU and let me stay overnight at the cousin's house before driving me to the airport the next day. It was incredibly generous and solved my very real transportation problem, as I had no car and no money for a bus. The weather had been worsening, and by the time they picked me up, snow was starting to fall in earnest. By evening, a blizzard had set in, and the roads were getting treacherous.
We spent the evening at the cousin's house, and we had a good time. The cousin was a cute boy and very flirtatious, and we all laughed and enjoyed each others' company.
The next morning, the weather was truly hideous and the roads were terrible. I kept calling the airport to check that the flight was still on, and I also started calling the guy who had my companion ticket to see if he was going to make it to the airport, which he said he was trying to do but was having issues because of the weather.
The reason I was so worried was that the instructions for the tickets stated very clearly that unless both people for the companion tickets were at the airport, the other one would not be able to board. At least, that is what I understood. Being young and stupid, I didn't ask any questions because I was afraid that if I asked I would be told I couldn't go on the plane. If I couldn't fly home, I didn't know what I would do because I knew my parents really couldn't afford to purchase another ticket. This is what I told Joseph and his cousin, so they knew my concerns.
Joseph's aunt drove the three of us to the airport that morning. Joseph and his cousin accompanied me into the airport to help me check my bags and walk me up to the gate (you could do that in those days). As the time to board came closer and closer, my companion ticket holder had still not arrived. I still didn't ask the gate agent what would happen if he didn't show up because I assumed I would be denied boarding.
Finally, I had to board, but what to do? That is when Joseph's cousin came up with the brilliant idea to pretend to be the other guy and board the plane and fly to Minnesota with me. In those days, a boarding pass was all you needed, so it was possible. Had we thought about it for a moment, we would have realized how very dumb that plan was (at the very least, why him? Joseph was the one who lived in Minnesota, so he would just be going home a little early), but we were young, and he was obviously attracted to me and had become a little reckless because of it.
(Argh! I'm squirming so hard with embarrassment right now I'm going to put my back out!)
The cousin and I got on the plane and flirted all the way back to Minneapolis, where he got off to call Joseph's surprised parents for a ride to their house, and I caught my connecting flight to Duluth. Meanwhile, back in Salt Lake City, poor Joseph had to go out and inform his aunt that her son had hopped on a plane. And when the companion ticket holder did finally show up to the airport, they searched and searched for his boarding pass, which had disappeared, only to find it amongst the boarding passes for my flight, which mystified them (they did allow him to board the plane for a later flight, so he did make it home).
And the final cherry on top of my embarrassment--at least, for this leg of the journey--is that the cousin missed a very important dance that his girlfriend (!!) had been looking forward to for weeks. The fact that it was his idea to hop on the plane with me is irrelevant because I should have just asked some questions about the ticket and avoided all the hullabaloo.
To say that Joseph's aunt was furious with me, her son, and the universe is fair. I'm not sure of how it happened, but she was able to hold one of the return tickets hostage until someone paid for her son's Greyhound bus ticket home. My mom didn't have the money, so the poor companion ticket holder's parents had to cough it up even though they were not at fault in any way for what had happened. The cousin spent Christmas with Joseph's parents and then got the Greyhound bus home, though he got delayed in Iowa or Nebraska for a while when the temperatures dropped so low the diesel fuel in the bus tanks gelled. The bright side was that he met a girl from my dorm on the way back to Salt Lake, and because she was very cute, I'm sure they had a wonderful trip. After we were back on campus for spring semester, she told me he had said to say hi to me when she was relating to me how they ended up stranded together in some podunk town in the midwest.
I never actually spoke to Joseph's cousin again, although Joseph and I remained friends. I have no idea if the cousin's girlfriend forgave her wayward boyfriend, but Joseph was kind enough to never throw this incident in my face in later years.
Unfortunately, I was so embarrassed about what happened that I could never face the companion ticket holder, so I never apologized, and whenever we happened to see each other on campus, it was horribly awkward.
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That is my tale. Was it an awesome story for Joseph's cousin? Maybe. That would be my only consolation. He was a lot of fun, though if his former girlfriend is reading this (haha!), nothing more than flirting happened.
Now I hope that my brain can consider this embarrassing moment sufficiently dumped and handled and not bother me with it ever again.
