Driving to Dallas

In some state of confusion last month, I arranged to fly from Windsor to Boston at 6:15 a.m. This meant getting up this morning at 4:30 a.m. to catch a cab to the airport.

I read an article recently about hotel air conditioning and heating. Apparently it’s much more expensive to hotels to have quiet, central heating and cooling, which is why most hotel rooms have a combination heater and air conditioner under the window. The quieter units cost a lot more, and so the older and cheaper the hotel, the more likely you are to have a very loud and annoying machine in your room. The Radisson Windsor obviously opted for the very cheapest model, and as a result my sleep for the past three nights has been punctuated every 45 minutes by a loud clunk, followed by some noisy heating, followed by silence.

Which is all to say that as I type this at Gate Two in the Windsor Airport, I am not particularly well rested.

However much unrest I might feel, I will never match the adventures of the cabbie who drove me to the airport this morning. Last week he received word that his cousin, who he hadn’t seen for 26 years, was going to be in Dallas, Texas for several hours. So my cabbie, his wife, children and parents rented a car in Windsor, drove to Dallas (stopping only for 5 hours in a hotel halfway there), spent 3 hours with his cousin, and then drove back.

The closest I’ve ever come to matching this feat was driving from Vancouver to Peterborough, and although I pushed hard, I did stop every night, and did it in four days. At the end of my journey my hands were glued to the steering wheel, and I had nightmares about driving for several weeks thereafter.

My cabbie said that in this fast-paced hectic world, people have to stop and slow down once in a while. That his example of this was driving 2,500 km at 150 km/hour to see his cousin for 3 hours is somewhat odd, but still, somehow, rings true.