Chronicles On My Trip, Part III: Trying Not To Reach Out And Touch Someone

I'm so glad that I had this fucking hotel fiasco behind me, and thank Buddha I still had enough energy and foresight to remember that I still had to deal with my sister and what we're going to do now that our itinerary has been pushed back a day.

My parents and I talked about communication during our trip, especially if something bad happened.  I didn't even bother making plans for my phone; I'm not paying any international roaming fees, I just wasn't going to use it.

However, my brother made plans for Mother, with whom he shares a family plan.  (Father and I share another plan; I'll get to how that happened some other time.)  She still needs to keep in touch with the store, so she said that he set up some extra texting plan; if she needed to send a message regarding the store, she would text my brother (who was staying in the States until the middle of the week when he had to be at the Italian villa for my sister's wedding) and he would be the liaison to the store.  Obviously it was going to be used for emergencies like flight delays as well.

While we were in line at Air Canada rebooking our flight, she thought I should help her text my brother an order that my uncle, running the store in my parents' place, needed to fill.  But since he needed to know information about our delayed flight, I suggested that we wait and send two messages in the same text.  She agreed.

Like I said in the Chronicle Part II, the only good thing about the fucking fleabag known as the Sandalwood Suites is that they had free and working Internet because I was then able to e-mail sister about our predicament (oh, as well as that order for my uncle at the store, just in case my brother didn't get the text).  The Hilton also had complimentary e-mail, so I checked in to see whether my sister got the message and sent something back; hell, I wanted to make sure I hit the "Send" button in my rush to get to the van outside the Sandalwood.

I checked my e-mail, on a computer on a stand-up stand in a shrouded area of the ground floor of the hotel, feet away from the main lobby.  Whew!  I wasn't so clumsy that I just forgot to send it, because my sister responded to that e-mail a little more than a half-hour after I sent it, I think.  She actually sent two or three.  In the first one she was confused as to why we missed it; I didn't specify that we indeed missed it, or maybe she couldn't believe we missed it.

The second was her explaining how this ruins our plans.  We were supposed to have the whole day with my sister and brother-in-law, crash at their place overnight, then take a train to Milan the next morning.  I was really looking forward to the tour she booked for my parents and I; shortly after arriving at the train station, we were supposed to attend a tour that would take us to see The Last Supper.  I want to see that.  But that seemed well nigh impossible at this point.

But the one thing that stuck out to me on her furious, worried correspondence to me was the one think I assiduously wanted to avoid: She wanted us to call her.  Shit, do we have to?  Isn't e-mail enough?  She was panicking, but from our end, there wasn't much we could do besides what has been done, which was that we missed our flight, the earliest one is the next flight the next day, and we frankly don't care what happens once we get to Switzerland.  My thought was that seeing them is important enough that we'd punt Milan and spend that day with them.  But I guess that wasn't her line of thinking, or that she didn't want to make a decision until she heard from us.

Mother called me from my hotel phone and wanted me to come over.  With the hell of the evening behind us and a luxurious night in a city we didn't plan on being in its limits ahead, this was the time where she wanted me to finally text my brother about not only that order but also what happened to us.  Oh, and she wanted me to recharge her iPhone while I'm at it.

So I now have Mother's phone -- one that works, one set up (whatever that actually means) for international roaming, and we are still in North America.  And all I could think of was preferring not to communicate with my sister in the way she wanted me to at that moment.

But that wasn't fair to her.  Yeah, I really thought things could be cleared up through e-mail.  But maybe with this fuck-up, we need to, you know, talk to each other.  Besides, the parents would understand me using Mother's cell to call her.  This kind of counts as an emergency, doesn't it?

So after checking e-mail one more time -- where she may have sent me a third message stating that she has calmed down and arranged new train tickets for us, although this may have been early the next morning -- and finally texting my bro, I went upstairs and, around 2 in the morning, way after my point of exhaustion, I bit the bullet (well, Mother's bullet, because she's paying for this) and called my sister long distance.

"Mama!" my sister exclaimed, finally being released from my unintended silent treatment that I realized only then was kind of killing her.

"That is incorrect," I replied, to which she said, "Oh."  Wouldn't expect nothing more than that enthusiasm coming from her.

And so we talked for about fifty bucks ten minutes about what happened (Pearson airport in Toronto starting suffering back-ups because they decided they wanted to, like, construct a new runway that evening) and what we should do.  She really emphasized the importance of getting to Milan: "We have train tickets.  TRAIN TICKETS!!!" she said, twice, to which I responded, "You say that like it's important."  (Maybe I said that, but maybe I said something less jackassy.)  I reiterated what I thought was important, which was seeing them.  But eventually I just told her that I was fucking tired, and if she thought that getting on a train to Milan was more important than spending some free time with with the new addition to our family, well, fuck it, I told her that she should do what she thinks is best.

I wanted to go to bed ... naw, I really wanted to look around and enjoy my awesome surroundings.  Seriously, I haven't been in so swank a room since I went to Dallas for a week to attend the Minor League Baseball Job Fair and I got this suite with a balcony.  (Had old chicken bones on the floor, but whatever.)  But she told me she'd call back after she thought things through with her current (and soon-to-be-once-again) husband.  Call us back?  If she was so concerned, why didn't she just call Mother in the first place?  Did my sis think she'd be mad if she took the initiative?

After about, oh, half an hour, she finally called back.  She decided they were going to go down to the train station and change our tickets.  We would definitely miss The Last Supper tour, but the main thing was not to burn the hotel reservation in Milan (that was already paid for), getting to the train that would take us from Milan to Florence in time and getting back on schedule.  They'd take care of it.  OK.

The bill for this month probably already came in.  I'm not going to even bother asking Mother how much these international calls and texts cost now.  But a Plan B was decided upon and communicated that early morning.  Much good money was thrown after bad, but things worked out as good as they could.

One final phone cock-up: I was woken up the next morning, very early, by my brother.  I bolted out of my bed on hearing my Mother's ringtone, a Chinese version of "Pretty Woman."  When I ran toward the socket where the iPhone was being recharged I was still in a daze, a result of not getting enough sleep from my hectic, hellish night before.

I drag the phone over to activate.  I vomit out a "hello?"  It was my brother.  That's one of the few things I remember about the call.  To this day I still wonder what exactly he said to me.  I know that he was expecting Mother and that the call was very short.  There's also the possibility I had reception issues.  I told Mother some time after that that he called me when he was trying to call her; she said that he called her later and said not to text via the phone anymore.  Sort of ironic; all this time I tried to avoid using the phone, and the one connection we had back to the States, Mother's iPhone to my brother, he tells us to stop using.