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traveling on my birthday
Monday, February 16 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York, USA
I spent most of the abbreviated night sleeping on the beanbag in the laboratory. Since I knew we'd be leaving to catch our plane sometime after 3:00am, it was nice to be able to look up now and then at the Ahmed Mohamed clock to see how much time I had left to sleep.
When Gretchen finally announced it was time to get up, I was almost already awake. As we bungled around in our house doing the few things we needed to do (like straightening out the bed for our house sitter), I noticed a fairly large wet spot next to Neville. It turned out he had done the thing he has always done on rare occasions: he had wet the bed. Fortunately, it had already begun to dry and didn't have much of a fragrance, so we figured we had plausible deniability about it and pretended like it hadn't happened at all. Neville was probably acting out a bit in response to the packing and preparing activity he'd seen us doing all yesterday.
The main thing left for me to do was to prepare a couple cream cheese sandwiches, as there wouldn't be many (or perhaps any) eating opportunities today until we were on the island of Grenada. (Daiya has a very good chive vegan cream cheese these days that both Gretchen and I are very fond of.)
By word-of-mouth, Gretchen had learned of a service where a guy will drive up to an airport and then return our car back to our house and then do the same thing when we return. We'd be flying out of Albany, where the parking expense is pretty low, but even so it would probably come to more than the $160 it would cost for both drop off and pickup. So she had hired the guy. His name was John and he showed up just when he'd said he would, and the only real complication was finding a place to park his vehicle with enough room for him to get out while leaving enough room on the other side of the vehicle he would be driving us in to get past his vehicle. It's an interesting business, and, according to John, the thing that makes it workable is that he drives the customers' vehicles, which removes all the wear and tear on his vehicle and keeps his insurance expenses down. Not only does John do it, but he also has his daughter and a few others doing it. My only complaint about this business is that it requires our vehicles to drive twice as far as they otherwise would, since they have to travel to and from the airport on both ends of the vacation.
As we were waiting in line to go through security, Gretchen suddenly realized she was still wearing her heavy winter coat, which she'd intended to leave in our Subaru. Now she would have to drag it all over the Caribbean, where it wouldn't be of any use at all. She half-heartedly asked someone at the info desk of there were lockers for her to rent to store the coat in, but of course there weren't any. Fortunately, that coat would still have some uses for her, as the atmosphere inside the planes we'd be flying in would be a bit too cold for tropical attire.
Since Albany is a small low-stress airport, Gretchen had arranged for us to get there only an hour before our flight, which is about half the recommended amount of time, at least since 9Eleven. But it was plenty of time for us, especially once we learned our flight was being delayed by some last-minute maintenance issue that the pilot had noticed. Once that delay emerged, our stress switched to worrying about whether we would make our connection in Atlanta for the flight from there to Grenada, since there was originally only an hour to spare in Atlanta, and that is an unusually large airport.
Typically maintenance issues where the staff at the gate get on every fifteen minutes to give updates go on for hours, and we were worried we'd end up spending the night in Atlanta. But then after only about 45 minutes of being in limbo, our flight miraculously began to board.
A further miracle was that Gretchen and I ended up in that pair of seats near an exit door in a section where people are otherwise crammed together in three-seat combinations. An enormous guy with distinctive folds on the back of his neck had temporarily taken up residence in one of our seats, but he was soon out of our way.
For most of the two-hour flight to Atlanta, I watched a French film on the airplane's entertainment system called When Fall is Coming, mostly because of all the mushrooms in the thumbnail. The film focused on two elderly women living in a small town in the French countryside. One of the women is visited by her bitchy money-grubbing daughter and her loving grandson, and she treats them to a meal of mushrooms she and the other elderly woman collected in the forest. But the grandson doesn't like mushrooms and the cook wasn't hungry, so only the daughter eats the mushrooms. The daughter ends up sick from apparent mushroom poisoning, though survives after getting her stomach pumped. Then the son of the other elderly woman gets out of prison and needs work, so he starts working for the woman who almost killed her daughter. Meanwhile that daughter has pretty much made it impossible for her son to visit his own grandmother, claiming she cannot be trusted. One day the ex-convict son of the other old woman shows up at the apartment of the almost-mushroom-killed daughter (an apartment the ungrateful daughter had already been given) and we don't see exactly what happens, but the daughter ends up falling to her death. Increasingly it seems clear that the old woman had wanted her own daughter dead. It's not the kind of film I would normally watch, but it was perfect for the plane. (Also, since the earphones were so terrible and the plane so loud, it was best to just watch a film with subtitles.)
After landing in Atlanta and getting off our plane, Gretchen and I ran as quickly as our aging bodies would allow through the airport, weaving around all the semi-bewildered fellow-travelers plodding glacially wherever they were going as if they were furniture strewn before us. We made it to the train to take us to the international terminal just before the doors closed and it was only then that Gretchen realized she'd left another water bottle behind, this one a fancy copper once she had loved and only recently purchased.
When we got to the gate for our Grenada flight, it hadn't even started boarding yet. Just before getting on, we both took doses of ambien, and I was already shrouded in a bit of mental fog when I finally made it to our seat. We'd been seated with a rando in a triplex of seats, but the rando quickly moved elsewhere, giving it all to us. I fell asleep as our plane soared over the snowless agricultural fields of Georgia and didn't awaken again until we were over the Bahamas. At that point I watched the rest of When Fall is Coming and then tried to watch a number of other things. There was nothing to scratch my gadget-loving/maker itch, so I tried Yellowstone for a half hour or so just to see why Red State America loves it so much. When rugged cowboys riding horses and not acting particularly gay didn't do much for me, I tried a few other series, but I was so disappointed I ended up playing a round of solitaire in the game option. (I won my first and only game)!
As we neared Grenada, we were told to fill out a customs & immigration form online on a crappy bug-laden website. After touching down, our plane emptied from a stairway attached to the back door, and, since we'd been seated near the back, we were among the first to disembark. Soon thereafter, we were told by staff at the airport that the website was misbehaving and that we had to fill our the customs & immigration form by pen. And there were only a few pens available. But somehow we got a pen, did the busy work, and eventually had some staffer help us use a computerized system to scan our passports.
After we'd left the airport, Gretchen couldn't find her passport anywhere and realized she must've left her passport at the passport scanner. As she was going in to ask if it had been found, the guy who'd helped us scan it was walking out to return it to her.
Soon thereafter we had a ride that Gretchen had arranged at the recommendation of the ecolodge where we'd be staying tonight. The driver spoke English in with a strong island accent that made some things he said difficult to parse. But the drive was a long one on the narrow & twisty coastal road and it was interesting to learn his take on things. He seemed to be okay with the current Grenadian government, for example, and it was a little strange to be jealous of him for that. Along the way we learned about the sugar cane fields, the rum factories, and the "rivers" (most not much bigger than the Chamomile) that connected them. As we drove, I noticed that the drivers on the road had the same cooperative driving style that had so impressed me this summer in Sri Lanka, one where the idea of "right of way" is meaningless and everyone is willing to defer to anyone else, but not so much that everyone is paralyzed by indecision. "If this were in America," I said, "Everyone would be crashing into everyone else out of their belief that they have the 'right of way'!" The big difference here (compared to Sri Lanka, Mexico, and especially India) was the lack of plastic trash. Grenada is an unusually tidy country. Later in the drive, as our driver pointed out the police station, I joked (as part of an earlier joke about it being my birthday and my desire to try the local rum) that that was where I would be ending up tonight.
Our destination, where we arrived about an hour after we'd set off, was the Mount Edgecombe eco-resort in St. Mark, which is nearly all the way up the west coast of Grenada from the international airport at its southwestern cape. Gretchen had booked it after noticing it as an excursion destination for the sailing cruise we'd be going on. It was tucked away in a rainforest and featured two pools, which is precisely what Gretchen was craving after such a relentless snowy winter.
While I was in our room taking a much-needed shit, Gretchen was off checking out the better of the two pools (though both could be described as "inifinity pools"). She came running back to tell me I was missing out on the sunset, so I grabbed my camera to photodocument the event.
Though earlier today Edgecombe had just prepared a meal for 40 vegans on an excursion related to the boat we'd be boarding later this week, they seemed a little confused by our demands when we came to dinner. Nothing on the menu was suitable, so they whipped up something custom in the kitchen. It was a stewed of potatoes, various savory tropical plants, macaroni elbows, and greens, and came with a side of chick peas and was amazingly delicous, partly because we'd mostly been getting by on tiny lumps of overpackaged snack food all day. We also each ordered fruity rum cocktails to celebrate my birthday. This was, I believe, the first birthday in the entire time Gretchen and I have been together that didn't involve pizza, Mexican food, or both.
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Grim signage on a vending machine in the Albany airport. Click to enlarge.
We woke up this morning near the Catskills but got to see the sun go down into the Caribbean from the northwest coast of Grenada. Click to enlarge.
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