There was a time early in my years as a columnist when I was best known for two things – home remodeling disasters and vacation disasters. Today, friends, we return to those halcyon days.
I’d forgotten how much readers enjoyed my travel fiascos until we were in the Phoenix airport on our way home from Mexico this month and ran into several of them waiting to board the plane to Boise. Told that our trip had been great until disaster struck on the last day, they literally squealed with delight:
“Ooooh! We can’t wait to read about it.”
The disaster was the “travel blunder extraordinaire” referred to at the end of my column two weeks ago. It’s embarrassing to write about it, or, for that matter, even to think about it. But maybe reading about it will keep someone else from making the same, boneheaded mistake. Call it a cautionary tale.
Our first-ever trip to Mazatlan last was – until the last day – an unqualified success. Thanks to my chiropractor, Jim Kranz, we stayed in a drop-dead gorgeous condo that his sister couldn’t use and needed to sub-lease for two weeks. We read books, swam, walked on the beach … If we’d been any more relaxed, we’d have been dead.
Until the e-mail from hell arrived on my phone.
The e-mail was from Expedia, which I’d used to book our flights. To fully appreciate my reaction upon reading it, you need to know that I am borderline obsessive-compulsive when it comes to making travel arrangements. I double- and triple-check everything. I make printouts of reservations and itineraries – even copies of the printouts – and re-check them once or even more while at our destination.
But not this time. There is such a thing as being too relaxed.
So it’s not exaggerating to say that Expedia’s e-mail came as something of a thunderbolt.
“Your flight from Mazatlan to Phoenix has been canceled,” it said.
Canceled? CANCELED?
Reading further, “Your flight from Phoenix to Boise has been canceled.”
The e-mail included a number to call in the unlikely event that we found the prospect of being stranded in Mexico unsettling:
“Our flights are canceled? How can you cancel our flights? What are we supposed to do, get jobs selling Señor Frogs T-shirts?”
“Your flights are canceled because they’ve left,” an infuriatingly cheerful operator replied. “You weren’t on them.”
This was patently impossible. And I could prove it. The printout of the itinerary I hadn’t bothered to check lately was in my suitcase. It would show beyond any doubt that we were booked to return the next day.
Only we weren’t. It is and will forever remain a mystery how it happened, but I’d booked our return flights for Friday March 6 instead of Saturday March 7.
Even when this was undeniable, it didn’t compute. We’d booked the condo until that Saturday. I’d been telling everyone for two months that we were returning that Saturday. There wasn’t a sliver of doubt in the mind of the guy who triple-checks everything that we were coming home that Saturday. I’d have bet my firstborn and my last dollar on it.
So certain was my faith that not even when a friend e-mailed a red flag did my conviction waver. His e-mail said he’d checked our itinerary online and was wishing us a pleasant trip home on Friday.
… To which I confidently replied that he must have mis-read the itinerary because we weren’t coming home until Saturday.
As you can imagine, the mistake put me into a bit of a funk. The night before, we’d had dinner at a place where the waiter offered us shots from a gallon jug of tequila with a rattlesnake in the bottom. We declined, but now I considered going back and chugging the whole thing, rattlesnake and all. Our condo was on the fifth floor and had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to the sea – a running jump would put me out of my misery. Mexican work permits and a cheap apartment were a somewhat less drastic option.
As is often the case, however, our dilemma was nothing that a whole lot of money wouldn’t fix. The airline was willing (and probably delighted) to change our reservations so that we could come home Saturday as planned if not for my lame brained mistake.
The price: a little over what the drop-dead gorgeous condo cost for two weeks! Missing your flight isn’t as expensive as oral surgery, but it’s close.
Yes, now that you mention it, it does still sting.
There are, however, a couple of bright spots. One is that I’ve relieved myself of the responsibility of making future flight reservations. From now on my wife, who is smarter, will make them.
The other bright spot – this would be the cautionary-tale part – is that in the future everyone who’ll be traveling with us will check and double-check the reservations. It shouldn’t be up to one fallible human (some of us being more fallible than others) to make sure everything is correct. Take it from someone who has learned the hard way. If you’re booking a trip for you and your spouse, have your spouse back you up. If friends or kids old enough to read are going, have them check the details. If the dog is going, have the dog check the details.
And now you’ll have to excuse me. It’s time for me to leave for the McDonald’s job I got to pay off the credit card.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Statesman every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

MAZATLAN, Mexico – Including a day trip to Tijuana while in the Navy at San Diego, I’ve been to Mexico eight times and somehow missed Mazatlan – one of the closer resort cities to Idaho.
Until last month.
Our trip got off to a shaky start in the Boise airport. The agent checking us in was blowing her nose and sneezing on our luggage tags, driver’s licenses, boarding passes … We fought her off with hand sanitizer, but upstairs at our gate there she was again. And once we were on the plane – re-sanitized – she joined us to do a head count. We half expected to see her, soggy Kleenex in hand, clinging to the wing when we took off.
Mazatlan, however, was great. For starters, the dollar was almost 50 percent stronger against the peso than it was a year ago. Most of the breakfast and lunch choices at the place where we stayed were under $4. Mexican beers that cost $4 in restaurants in Boise were about 70 cents.
Mazatlan is unique for having two things – the world’s third largest Mardi Gras celebration (after Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans) and pulmonias. We missed Mardi Gras by a few days, but we became instant fans of pulmonias, which exist nowhere else in the world.
Pulmonias are overgrown golf carts, made with Volkswagen parts and used as taxis. Drivers of regular taxis were jealous of the fanfare the open-air taxis received when they were introduced, so they told customers they’d get pneumonia riding in them. Pulmonia is Spanish for pneumonia.
Humberto Valasquez, who has been driving the same, meticulously maintained pneumonia for 20 years, took us on a tour of the city in it. Because we’d just missed Mardi Gras, I asked him what it was like.
“A big parade on the Malecon (one of the world’s longest). Lots of people – 400,000 visitors in town wearing masks and drinking. Nine months later, a lot of babies are born.”
About like New Orleans, in other words.
Humberto used to work in a restaurant, but he likes being outdoors driving his pneumonia better.
“A lot of the restaurants aren’t doing well,” he said. “The all-inclusive resorts have hurt them. People eat for free there, so they don’t go out to dinner as much. They don’t even go out for drinks because the drinks at the resort are free.”
Pacifico beer is made in Mazatlan. That, and myriad varieties of tequila – from regular agave tequila to coffee tequila, almond tequila, mango tequila …
“Tequila is our national drink,” our gregarious tour guide said, laughing. “That and beer, and vodka, and rum …”
Like many of the people we met in Mazatlan, Humberto truly seemed to enjoy life. Except during Mardi Gras, the city is low key, laid back. The street and beach vendors are almost sedate compared with those in other places we’d been, and in two weeks we met exactly one guy who was pushing time shares. In Puerto Vallarta, you see more than that before you leave the airport.
Add perfect weather and friendly, helpful locals and you have a textbook winter getaway. In fact, we had such a good time we wanted to go back.
Until the next to the last day of our vacation – and the e-mail from hell.

Next: A travel blunder extraordinaire.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Note:  Am posting this column a week late because I’ve been out of the country for two weeks. Sorry for the delay. — Tim

The Brian Williams story has bothered me ever since it broke. If you’re a journalist, especially one who has spent time in a war zone, it can’t help but bother you.
It disturbs me for a number of reasons. First, I liked Brian Williams. Liked, and trusted him. He was authoritative as a reporter and anchor and as likable as a favorite uncle. He had a sense of humor. He liked sports (even at the risk of sometimes over-reporting them). He seemed like a guy you could sit down with in a pub and enjoy a lively chat about anything from Washington gridlock to football.
So it bothered me that such a seemingly good guy fell so far from grace – and that it was so unnecessary. He had everything going for him. He was enjoying greater success that 99 percent of journalists ever do. He didn’t need to lie. All he had to do was keep doing everything he did so well and he’d have cruised to an idyllic retirement.
Everything, that is, except lying. As a liar, he’s clueless. Did he really think he could tell those whoppers in the digital age and that no one would
notice? Being hit by enemy fire isn’t something you “misremember.” You misremember where you parked your car. Being shot at is something you absolutely remember – vividly, and for life.
Perhaps most distressing for journalists is that Williams’s fondness for embellishment is a hit to the profession. If someone as trusted and respected as he was fabricated stories, viewers are entitled to wonder, who else is doing it?
But what bothered me most is the why? Why, when he had nothing to gain and everything to lose, would he do such a thing?
And he most definitely had nothing to gain. I know this from personal experience.
That’s not to say that I’ve been in combat. When the Navy was sending virtually every graduate of the communications-technician school I attended straight to Vietnam, it sent me to Germany. In a 40-year career at The Statesman, covering everything from plane crashes to buffalo hunts, only once was I anywhere near a war zone. And it was more than enough to teach me the futility of embellishing what happened there.
It was 1999. The Kosovo War. The Statesman sent photographer Gerry Melendez and me to Sicily and Albania, ostensibly to write about Idahoans involved in the war. In Sicily, we covered Idaho Air Guard crews who were conducting bombing missions against the Serbs. In Albania, we were to cover Idaho volunteers who were helping Albanian refugees of the war.
It took roughly five minutes, however, to realize that the best stories were those of the refugees themselves. They were living in camps where conditions approximated camping with several thousand of your closest friends. Many had lost everything in the war.
Gerry and I did some of the best work of our careers in Albania, but you wouldn’t have known it from what appeared in print. (I can write about it now because The Statesman has different and better management.)
Our second-best story, one we sweat blood over for two days, was never published. When we got home, we were told that it had mysteriously disappeared after being read by one editor. The story that did appear that day was a few hastily written paragraphs from a 30-second interview with an Idaho volunteer who would barely speak to us.
Our best story was about Albanian women and girls who gathered each evening to weep and wail under a tree in one of the camps. The Serbs had killed all the men in their village – their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, lovers. It may have been the most powerful story I ever wrote, and it was rewritten and combined with wire copy to be almost unrecognizable.
What I remember most, though, isn’t the anger we felt about the way our stories were handled. It was gut-wrenching fear.
I’m not a Bob Simon or a Richard Engel; I’ve never been closer to a shot fired in anger than one from the rifle of a German guard who caught me sneaking under a base fence after a night on the town. But I have no trouble at all imagining how those courageous reporters feel when being sent into harm’s way.
Before Gerry and I went to Albania, we were told there was a chance we could get close to the fighting and that we could opt out of the trip if we chose. And Albania at the time had been the most isolated and and one of most oppressed places on the planet – terrorism, executions, suppression of the most basic rights. If that weren’t enough, there was the war. Neither of us opted out, but I’ll never forget lying awake all night before we left, wondering whether we’d see home and our families again. It was as scared as I’ve ever been.
Once in Albania, work took over and fear was forgotten. Nothing bad happened to us there. And, here’s the thing – even if something terrible had happened, it wouldn’t have meant that we were one whit more courageous. What takes courage isn’t surviving things that happen in dangerous places, it’s choosing to go to places where bad things can happen to you. Brian Williams did that. He didn’t need to embellish.
So why did he?
My guess is that his next appearance – his anchor job is history – will be on the cover of a book telling his side of the story.
It should be quite a read.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman and is published on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.