Brandon and Daisy Venture to North Carolina, Episode II: "Dogged"

 The trip from Omaha to Charlotte was mostly uneventful. I dozed off a few times on the plane. While I do love the adventure aspect of air travel I am not really a fan of the actual process, and I'm sure few are. This is primarily because I am not a small person, and neither is Daisy, and cramming ourselves into these airplane seats is not comfortable for flights longer than an hour or two at most. We make do with what we can, but none of it is particularly comfortable or fun.

Omaha to Charlotte is a somewhat long flight -- I believe it was like two and a half hours. We were, of course, flying halfway across the country. And, as mentioned before, we were flying American Airlines.

Hoo boy.

I learned during this trip that there are two classes of people -- there are people who can afford to fly Delta, which has upped its game tremendously over the course of the past decade or so, and then there are the people who aren't willing to pay double the ticket prices and who have to fly the low-cost airlines with multiple stops and/or multiple layovers. American is fine for what it is; it's likely near the top tier of the lower-cost airlines -- but the people who fly American are definitely a completely different class of people than the ones who fly airlines like Delta. American Airlines customers are definitively more white trash and generally just trashy people as a whole, and this was exhibited on these flights to and from North Carolina. People were rude, they were drunk, they were disgruntled -- it was very noticeable. 

It didn't help that American has zero screens in the back of their plane seats, they offer zero reading materials (not even a SkyMall magazine -- does that even still exist?), and their flight attendants were not only rude for the most part but were not even really attractive people. Does that make sense? I don't know if I've ever been on a set of flights were the flight attendants weren't gorgeous young women or very good looking flamboyant gay men -- at least not until these flights. I'm not trying to be elitist when I say that, but just factual. Is the job of flight attendant not traditionally, stereotypically, performed by some of the most attractive people possible? I'm not judging but rather making a wow observation that apparently this is no longer the case, at least not for American Airlines.

But the plus side is, American Airlines will give you the entire can of soda or juice when the in-flight snack service comes by. Delta and most other airlines will adamantly refuse to do that. I appreciate this, of course. I'm a guy who drinks like 100oz of liquid or more per day, and a little 4oz cup of soda watered down with ice isn't going to cut it if I'm thirsty. 

So, there we were, on long flights with zero screens to occupy us. Like I said, I dozed off for a bit a few times. Daisy read one of Nora McInerny's books that she hadn't yet read before. 

When we got to our gate in Charlotte, we found that our flight into Wilmington had been delayed. By the time we got on it, it had been delayed twice. I believe that they mentioned some sort of nebulous "mechanical issue" and that the planes would need to be swapped out, but honestly I was tired and didn't really pay that close attention. We finally got on it, later than expected, and lifted off towards Wilmington.

I had never flown into Wilmington airport. I expected it to be the equivalent of Morgantown's airport back home -- a small municipal airport with a couple of gates and one little terminal. I mean, Halifax's airport is pretty small and so is Bangor's -- and both of them I'm sure could be far larger than they actually are based on the population in their areas.

Well, Wilmington is apparently a big jumping off point for numerous touristy areas around coastal North Carolina -- it is on the coast itself, of course -- including Oak Island and other tourist towns and beaches, given its proximity. So it was a bit of a larger airport than I was expecting. And we were flying in riiiiiiight before Labor Day weekend, the last big tourism holiday of the summer.

It is not a bad airport. It is indeed somewhat small, but not as small as I expected. It's designed really well, really intuitively, and has some very pretty southern architecture. As we were arriving something like two hours later than expected, we still had to wait in line for the rental car.

We got to the rental car line and there were two people in front of us who were very chatty with the attendants. There was a long line that was forming behind us. I was very tired and irritable, we had already missed our opportunity to go get food somewhere or do any actual grocery shopping before we would get to my parents' house because it was late, and I had not had any nicotine other than the Nicorette mints in about nine hours at this point -- and the mints really don't work that well if you're going to use them for hours upon hours on end. Their effectiveness really begins to wane around hour six or so. I was getting very frustrated and irritated, to the point where I wanted to scream shut up, make with the keys, people have places to be to the customers in line in front of us who were so incessantly chatty. 

This is a failing of mine and I'm working on it, though I do not think I'll ever be able to rid myself of it entirely.

We were given the choice of a Camry or a Malibu for our rental car. I chose the Malibu, as we have had multiple Malibus in the past for rentals and knew how everything worked in them. I wasn't about to choose a Camry that we had no clue how to operate or where the controls were, etc -- new cars are confusing and mostly uncomfortable, as evidenced by the new Hyundai Elantra we rented last summer on our trip to Canada -- a car I never want to sit in again or ever drive.

I don't even remember what color Malibu we got now. That's how inconsequential it was to me for the trip. I believe it was black or a very dark gray. It was a fleet vehicle with Massachusetts plates I believe. Or Connecticut. Or Wisconsin. One of those states. Is it important now? Not at all.

It was already dark by the time we got it out of the rental lot and was only getting darker as we made our way to my parents' house, which was about a...eh, 40, 45-minute drive. It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but we were again reminded that North Carolina drivers are fucking crazy, and that North Carolina highways -- even the interstates -- do not have lights on them. So we were driving through the dark, passing by swamps, over bridges and through forests almost completely in pitch-black conditions -- which I hate. 

"How many gators do you think we've unknowingly driven by, just off the side of the road in the swamp?" I asked Daisy.

By the time we arrived, my mother had already gone to bed for the night -- my dad made sure she got up and saw us for a bit before she returned to bed. We were exhausted, and we were immediately accosted by the dogs. 

My parents have three dogs -- two golden retrievers and one shih-tzu. Sofie (yes, spelled with an F) is the oldest and largest golden retriever I've ever seen. She's now 11 or 12, which is ancient for a dog of her size and weight, and when we visited WV in 2017 she had to be close to 200 pounds -- this dog was larger than either of my parents and heavier at that. In her old age since, she has now dropped a lot of weight (she's like 115, 120 now) but is still quite large and is absolutely nuts. She's a dog the size of a small bear -- she will step on you, she will knock you down, she will bark and howl in your face, and if she doesn't get the attention she wants, she will bitch-slap you across the face with her paw, sending your glasses flying across the room. 

Don't ask me how I know about that last one. 

The second golden retriever is a new addition to the household since we were in town last year -- her name is Annie and my mother insisted she be adopted from someplace in WV once her breeding years were over, so they did -- last fall, after we left. Annie is six or seven, and is very nearly the perfect dog. She is very sweet, very intelligent, makes a great guard dog, and is active and playful without being an asshole about it. She is what I would describe as the ideal golden retriever, the dog I wanted when I was growing up. 

Hachi is the shih-tzu, and he is eight or nine at this point -- I can't remember how old. I know that when we were in WV in 2017 he wasn't a puppy, but he also wasn't fully grown either. He is a very sweet, hyper little yappy dog who actually closely resembles the (now long-deceased) shih-tzu we had when I was growing up, Moot. But, unlike Moot, Hachi isn't an asshole. Moot was the biggest asshole dog I've ever known. Hachi is like Moot without the asshole tendencies like growling and biting at you or trying to hump you to dominate you. He's a sweet boy, a lapdog, and he really loves people. He especially seems to love me when I visit. Per my dad, Hachi has girlfriends all up and down the street and all over the island, and is universally loved by everyone.

So, as we arrived, we were basically bowled over by the dogs. And of course, they're loud and unruly, which woke up the parrot, who also became loud and unruly and began screaming, all at like 10pm. Daisy and I were tired, unshowered, had eaten very little (we'd had some food in the airport but that's about it) and just wanted to relax, decompress, and go to bed. 

I don't remember much of the rest of the night; I don't even remember if I showered or not. My mother went back to bed, and dad and I sat on the back porch for a bit so I could vape, then we watched a bit of Picard as the parents had recently acquired Paramount+ and he was just beginning the third (and best) season of the show. I don't remember if I ate anything else. I don't remember if Daisy ate anything else. I was burnt out from traveling the entire way and eventually, I went to sleep with her.

When I woke up the next morning, Friday morning, it was early. My mother is usually up by 7 or so, so she tells me now -- which is a somewhat new thing. The dogs usually get my dad up around the same time, maybe slightly thereafter. But I was up around 5 and could sleep no longer -- the bed in that guest room, which we slept on last year too, is so very hard to sleep on for me, especially as I get older. It really messes with my hips, knees, and shoulders, and the parents keep the house a lot warmer than we keep ours at home, even with the AC. Even though it's my parents' house and therefore my home by extension, I was not about to turn their thermostat down to 67 or 66 -- the temperature we like it at home when it's hot in the summer.

And it is hot in North Carolina. It can be cooling down everywhere else, but in late August/early September, it is very much still summer in North Carolina, and with that comes humidity (I mean, we're on an island there, so there's ocean) and oppressive coastal heat. It was usually already into the low 80s by the time the sun came up in the morning -- I am only guessing there -- and got into the mid 90s by the time the sun was well into the sky. It can be very uncomfortable.

Because it was so early, I got up and made a cup of coffee and tried to get a small sandwich or something to eat without being too loud for the family. The dogs at this point are used to me, and used to us moving around when it's still dark -- Sofie will watch me, acknowledge me and wag her tail a little. Hachi usually sleeps with dad, and Annie usually sleeps on a dog bed next to the bed in the master bedroom.

Oh, there's something else I should mention, lest this story become more confusing without it -- my dad has been sick. He went to the hospital the week before we arrived because he's had pain in his abdominal region stretching down into his groin area. He thought it was a possible kidney stone, a hernia, or a flare up of diverticulitis -- which he has had for some time, but hasn't had any real incidents of note of for many years. When he went to the doctor, he was told it wasn't a hernia and was indeed a diverticulitis flare up, and got some antibiotics for it. He still felt like shit, but the antibiotics helped. Still, he was moving a lot more slowly and in pain, and because of Annie being a nut and running circles around the bedroom when both of them were in bed -- and I am sure because of the pain too -- he had been sleeping on the couch in the living room almost exclusively, for what I assumed to be some length of time. While we were there, he got further results back from his doctor that confirmed that yes, he had multiple kidney stones too -- something that would have been nice to know about previously, of course. 

So, he slept on the couch, which made it a bit difficult for us to move about the house in the night or early morning hours for, well...pretty much any reason. I am not a quiet person, though I try to be as much as possible. Daisy has told me before how loud of a person I really am even when I'm trying to be quiet. And I also cannot see in the dark. The Keurig makes noise when you make coffee. Doors opening and closing make noise. Lights shower light all over the main floor of the house. The refrigerator and microwave make noise. The back porch lights turn on and off with a voice command to the Alexa. I can't stop those things from happening, I can only try to lessen their impact as much as possible. So it was a...very interesting routine I had every morning in trying to not disturb the parents before they naturally got up. I honestly don't know how I didn't wake them. Maybe I did and they didn't say anything.

Anyway.

That day, Daisy wanted to go get some vegan food, and we needed to go to the grocery store to get us some food and other incidentals for a few days. The place Daisy wanted to go was back in Wilmington, a place called the Sealevel Vegan Cafe. I actually think I'd found it some time ago in doing some research of the area -- it had what was apparently voted PETA's best vegan hot dog of 2021, a cornflake-batter coated dog with buffalo sauce and slaw on it. I honestly cannot remember what it was called now, but it was something I'd noted that I wanted to go try while we were down there, so Daisy made it one of the stops we'd make. 

We went there that morning through a classic Carolina torrential rainstorm, a storm that was not really predicted and raged while we were inside. The food was fine. The dog was disappointing, and easily the least favorite thing I ordered (though still good). What was fire was their chickenless chicken sandwich and the made in-house kettle cooked potato chips.

Afterwards, we went to get vegan donuts and beignets at some little mostly-abandoned place downtown, picked up some groceries to last us a few days, and returned home.

There are a lot of things we did on the trip that I have a hazy memory of now, honestly. I was drained the entire time we were there. The bed in our guest room was less than comfortable, as I mentioned, and it felt like I was constantly inflamed while I was there -- allergies were terrible (they were last year too) and all of my joints constantly hurt when there. Ibuprofen and glucosamine were my best friends. I was in a lot of body pain. Daisy seemed to fare mostly okay for the most part, which surprised me. The most enjoyable parts of the trip for me were the times when I was just able to be myself -- the hour or two in the mornings where I could get a quiet cup of coffee on the porch with my vape and a book, and just sink into the chair. Some mornings I got bored and restless doing this and hoped everyone would just wake up and move about the house so I could have some company, and others I was so relaxed I could've fallen asleep on the porch chair -- and may have for a few minutes, briefly, from time to time. 

The next day, Saturday, was the home opener for West Virginia University's football season, versus Penn State. I had been looking forward to watching the game with my parents for weeks, as it would be the first game we'd been able to watch together for many years. Daisy was on board for this and was excited in her own way as well -- she is not a fan of football at all (despite my many years of trying to indoctrinate her into its cult), but as she's told me many times about a great many times, she just loves to see me excited and happy, as that makes her happy too. My parents, of course, are football fans and can, at times, be very passionate about it -- indeed, the first thing I saw when we pulled up to the house a few nights prior was the giant WVU flag I'd sent them for Christmas last year proudly flying off the flagpole on the front porch.

However, that morning was the local craft fair -- which we were interested in going to. The farmer's market we'd been so excited to go to when we were down there had ended for the season a week or two prior, but the craft fair (which was half of the farmer's market anyway, and in the same spot) was going strong and was done on Saturday mornings, apparently. So we'd planned to go to that. We asked my mother if she wanted to join us and she said she would. Dad would not, he was not feeling great and did not want to have to walk around for an hour or two -- which I understood, of course. Craft fairs aren't really his thing anyway. They're not really my thing either, but I know Daisy found several really neat things when we were down there last year, and I know my mother likes them and usually sees people she knows. So, we all piled into our rental car and the three of us went -- marking the first and only time that we've ever driven my mother anywhere for any reason. 

There wasn't really anything there that any of us wanted or were willing to spend the money on, but Daisy did get this really cute picture of us:

Multicolored hair and all. 

Also shows the size difference between me and my (very small) mother -- I am very surprised that I came out of a woman that small:

Like, I'm a big guy, but I'm not like 600 pounds or anything. It seems like my mother gets smaller every year. Her own mother did that too as she got older, and I am slowly shrinking in height as I get older as well. I guess it's a familial trait?

Anyway.

After the craft fair, as we were not there that long, we stopped at one of the "Beach Life" (or whatever it's called) souvenir shops -- which I figured would be a fun excursion to take with my mother in tow. I have not gone shopping with my mother for anything in well over fifteen years at this point, so having her come with us while I got some salt-water taffy and a hoodie, I thought, would be a fun excursion. And it was. She found a dolphin necklace she wanted, and we got it for her (Daisy later told me how she would likely wear it proudly all around everywhere and tell people her son bought it for her while he was in visiting, which warmed my heart). I got a long-sleeved sky-blue shirt and a black hoodie with "save the turtles" on it or something; I thought it was nice and the generic Oak Island hoodie I bought down there last year, from the same shop, was great -- it is warm and comfortable as hell, and it got heavy use last fall and winter -- so this one I expect to get the same amount of wear and use. 

We returned to the house and watched the game -- it did not go well for WVU and I dozed off on the couch for a decent chunk of it. By the time the second half rolled around I had mostly lost interest; I spoke to my oldest aunt on the phone for a decent amount of time when she called, and my mother went to bed early. I don't remember what Daisy and I did; I know we sort of just eventually retired to our room and fell asleep at some point. 

This was how most of the trip went -- get up for the day, have something planned that we do that takes some of the day, return to the house, and then spend the rest of the day at home while everyone winds down. Interspersed with a trip to the beach here and there.