Madness!

Unlike my previous long-term traveling experience, this trip spawned slowly, and then reached a pinnacle of unpreparedness shortly before departure. That is, supplies were thrown haphazardly into my red backpack mere hours before New Zealand Air would whisk us away to the Southern Hemisphere. Most of my brain had ceased functioning, and only sporadic memories culled from my last trip served to fulfill the majority of the supply list. Thus far I don't believe I've left anything vital behind, but only time will tell.

Other than a severely compressed preparation period, the first real act of drama occurred even before we boarded the airplane. Apparently a semi collided with a person on the highway between Colorado Springs and Denver, leaving traffic lingering in stasis for hours upon end. Having utilized all of my contingency time buying books and filing an amended tax return, a swift venture to the Denver airport was vital. Additionally, a short detour was required to wrangle my wayward traveling companion, a Mr. Travis “Marigold” Johnson. Time was pouring from the hourglass as if it had been shattered upon a concrete floor. Days of accumulated stress were culminating. My parents, still somehow surprised that I had planned things so horribly, even after years of habitual tardiness and procrastination, began to suffer the woes of a contagious anxiety spreading rapidly through the car. Still forty miles from the airport, and we were without Travis and at a complete standstill.

Perhaps this was it. My complete detachment from the realities of time would finally result in a firm kick in the groin, metaphorically speaking. I would miss the flight to Los Angeles, and severely disrupt the chain-of-events that would lead me to Australia. This would conceivably, and quite probably, lead to a partial, or full-blown nervous breakdown, coupled with a complete mental collapse, permanent deadening of certain parts of the brain, resentment from close relations and friends, and a travel companion left to his own devices to fend of killer wallabies in the Outback. As all of these pleasant sentiments drifted briskly through my pulsating cranium, and the impending doom wrapped its devilish fingers around my frantically jittering heart, the mass of stagnant cars began to fragment.

From what I can surmise, my hopes that the miniature black-holes produced by the new particle accelerator in Europe swallowing the wreckage along the highway were fulfilled, and traffic began to progress with greater fluidity. My certain encounters with the worlds deadliest spiders and Crocodile Dundee were again becoming a reality. The anxiety lessened slightly, Travis was delivered at a mutually agreed-upon midway-point by a kind and charitable Mr. Keith “Why the F*ck is Mazzola always late” Knoll, and arrival at the nest of the metal birds was, dare I say, right on time.

As I compose this post from a train heading to the Blue Mountains (which will be part of a later post), I wonder how much permanent brain damage actually occurred during the transitory madness between Woodland Park and Denver. Suffice-it-to-say, a pint of Cold Hop at the airport numbed the ailing mental faculties, and the first step onto the airplane offered some sense of assured arrival.

Stay tuned as the Mazzola and Johnson show broadcasts in miraculous electronic print from the airy, coastal haven of Sydney.

Post Note -
A special thanks to Mr. Knoll for depositing Mr. Johnson at the specified location, and to my parents for sharing in the frenetic ride to the airport!