Small Town Cab

I found this partly-written post from 2015.

I'm in a small town not too far from a big city, at a hotel early in the morning, and need to get back to the airport for another day of making lines in the sky. The cab is on time, but it turns out that it's the driver's first day, and I'm her first ever customer.  I had to give her instructions on how to close the door. It's one of those new ones where you can't slam it, you have to kind of indicate that you want the door to close, and then wait patiently for it to close itself. Not a Type A person's door. It took me a while.

There's an odd sound from the motor. I ask if the vehicle is an electric hybrid. "I dunno," the cab driver admits, "They just told me to pick a car."

I have to give the driver directions to the airport. People in small towns near big cities often aren't aware that they have their own airport. "The airport" means the big city airport.  Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, especially if English is not the driver's first language. This driver is fluent in English and she is willing to believe there is an airport in this direction. We go there.  I landed here once in an airplane with a GPS that didn't have the airport in the database, and the poor thing went into panic mode, thinking I was crashing instead of landing. It is one of those almost-deserted airports with a waist-high chain link fence, a little gate where you just lift the latch to swing it open, and engineless airplanes sitting in the long grass beside the pavement.

My notes say she charged me double, but not how I dealt with that. I probably just told her she was wrong and let her go through the credit card machine procedure again. While she was searching for the receipt book, I noticed that her fleece vest bears the logo of a transit company in the big city.  I asked about it and said she usually drives a school bus.

And then I suppose I went flying.

Highway 63

I've been to this airport before. I remember that you can't buy fuel on Sundays, but today is Saturday, and it turns out we've landed at the same time as another pilot who has a key to the pump, so she can fuel any time she likes. When she has filled the tiny tanks on her Cessna single, we stretch the hose out to our tanks and put in fifteen times as much fuel. (The fueller who filled us beside at the FBO next to the solar-powered coke bottles said we had set a record for the amount of avgas she had ever put in one plane. But we were really empty then. I'd gone a couple of minutes into our reserves, because we were working overhead the airport, and there was another one just down the valley, in case of emergency). We go in and pay, and call a cab, which arrives eventually, in the manner of small town cabs on the weekend.

It's an okay hotel, but it's on the edge of town, and the town is spread out enough that it would take about forty-five minutes to walk to a restaurant. And probably as long to get that cab back again, so we order pizza. We try to avoid eating pizza on the road, because eventually we'll be forced to, and we want it to be a treat. We eat the pizza together in my room, while watching a show called "Naked and Alone." It's kind of like Survivor except without the odd psychological games and the uncanny ability of the women to maintain an absence of bodily hair through the whole ordeal. There are actually two people, and they do start out naked, but have made themselves television-acceptable clothing by the time I tune in. They are really miserable: diarrhea from eating too much fruit, driven crazy from insect bites, and one of them doesn't like seafood, but the other one makes him eat it. At the end they get scores out of ten for their survival skills.

In the morning we come down to breakfast, standard motel breakfast of wrapped muffins, fruit, and make-your-own waffles. We ask the clerk if she can call us a cab. There are no cabs here until 9 am. The airport is not actually very far away from the hotel, but we'll be behind schedule if we throw in a half hour walk with our baggage. Back to the breakfast room to chat with the guys in reflective outwear and work boots. They have trucks. I ask them where they work.

"We work on highway 63."

They didn't even know there was an airport around here, but agree to make a small detour to drop us off. I've hitched rides before with a friend of the hotel receptionist, a medevac pilot, someone who just came to drop off her friend at the airport, and the guy who came out to sell us the fuel. It's become just part of the adventure.