So on the heels of going off to Cancun for a week, I was shipped off to Greenville, South Carolina for a week for work related stuff. I won’t go into the work stuff, but I did try to spend the rest of the trip like a mini vacation, so I took photos and such.
Just getting there proved to be the most harrowing part of the trip. A colleague and I arrived at Pearson with about an hour and a half before the flight, but by the time we worked out the pre-customs form stuff and got our boarding passes, we had about an hour left.
As we passed through US customs, I guess we didn’t say the right things, as we were shunted off to what I call a Detainment Area, where we were summarily fingerprinted, photographed and made to sit in a room with about 20 or so other people who looked like they weren’t going to be making it to their destinations either. We waited for quite a while, and overheard snatches of other people’s conversations with the agents, things like “we’re denying you entry to the US” and such, which made us think that the trip would be cut very short indeed. However, when it was finally our turn and we explained we were only going for meetings and not to actually work, which would have required a work visa, we were released to continue our journey. We made it through security without any issues (though I grumbles that I had to remove my loaner laptop from the apparently checkpoint-friendly laptop bag, the whole notion of it being checkpoint-friendly was to make it unnecessary to remove it) but when we made it to the gate, the tenders exclaimed “where were you? We’ve been paging.” Basically, we made it in time for the flight time, but normally by then they would have been on the runway about to take off. But we didn’t miss it, they quickly ushered us out of the building to the tarmac and up the staircase next to the plane. That was as new experience for me as well. I always felt it would seem more real to climb stairs into the plane, rather than just walk down the umbilical corridor into the doorway. So it was neat to finally get to do that. However, I feel now that instead of thinking it made it seem more real, I might have been confusing it with making it seem more like the movies.
The flight landed in Cleveland and we immediately disembarked and re-embarked at the same gate, though I’m not sure it was the same plane as the flight attendant was different. In total I think we spent maybe an hour in the air. I mean, by the time we reached cruising altitude, we had just enough time for the drinks trolley to pass before we’d be starting our approach to the destination airport. The company “travel agency” as it were arranged me a seat by myself in an aisle that only has one seat at all. That is, each row of seats is Seat, Aisle, Seat, Seat. So I got to be by myself with my immensity. It wasn’t painful to sit in those seats, but I wouldn’t say it was comfortable either, but I managed.
We stayed in the Hampton Inn, which had large rooms, large bathroom, large bed, it was quite nice, and more expensive than I would have stayed in myself if I were paying for it. Though the bathroom was well stocked with little containers of various products, each time housekeeping had been, things wouldn’t be quite right. For example one time I suddenly didn’t get a new container of shower gel, but instead had two containers of shampoo.
The hotel was right on a river which had, we were told, been beautified over the recent years. Where before it was a refrigerator graveyard, it now had little waterfalls and parks all around it. We walked around there a couple of times, usually on the search for restaurants, though we almost always ended up at the same one. Our favourite spot was a place called Smoke on the Water, and though the food was alright, it was the happy hour and $2 beers that brought us back. On our last night I had four beers, which probably was more beer in that single sitting than I had had over the course of the previous year.
The town, or at least the section we were near, was small, and reminded me of waterloo in the way that it seemed the whole place shut down at around 6. The only places that appeared to be open after leaving the restaurant were other restaurants. Unlike waterloo, the streets were dead too, without even drunken students to avoid. The general Greenville area seemed very large, but quite full of trees. Flying over it when we landed I remarked just how green it was from the sky.
The food was, as I’ve heard from other travellers to the Us, plentiful and inexpensive. At one place we were at twice, Cracker Barrel, our mains would have been quite enough, but we also got to pick 3 side-dishes, and cornbread of biscuits. And it came to 8 USD (which is pretty well 8 CND without dealing with fiddly small change). And most of the places were like that. One thing I noticed about the menu’s is that they would frequently use the word Veg where we would use Side. In that, a menu might say that with your burger you got two Vegs, the selection of them frequently included Macaroni and Cheese, which I found a little odd. And the bread you would get with your meal was frequently corn bread, which was a nice change. The only thing I noticed with drinks is the concept of Ice Tea. At home, it usually tastes like it was made from a sugary powder form. In the US (at least using the 2 sample points of data I have) it appears that if you ask for Ice Tea, you get Iced Tea, quite literally, and it is not sweetened. If you want that, you ask for Sweet Tea, but even then, it’s still more like actual tea, that’s been cooled down, and sweetened.
Everyone we met was reasonably friendly. Perhaps too friendly, as one incident will illustrate. So my colleague brought along his GPS and we relied on it quite heavily. On our way back from the office to the airport for the journey home, we started to drive but didn’t actually have the address of the airport, so we found an empty looking street, pulled off a bit, put on the hazard lights and started going through its database looking for the airport and, once found, for the satellites to find us as it usually took a while for the think to find its marbles. While we were there, a guy drove up behind us, waited for a second, then pulled off as well, and got out of his car. At this point we were a little worried, since this type of thing usually doesn’t go well, so when he approached the car, we lowered the window a bit, and the guy said in a reasonably southern accent “Hi’yall, you fellows okay?” (may not be an exact quote, but it was as disarming). We explained we were just setting up the GPS, thanked him, he wished us well and drove on. Friendly, yes, but we’re from Toronto, where such things are more alarming.
The flights home were mostly uneventful, it was pretty stormy when we made it back so it took a while to land, and I finally made it home to my apartment. I survived the US and all I got was this lousy pair of shoes (actually they are fairly nice shoes, bought because my current ones were failing apart as per the 6-month rule).
Two international trips in one year, I’m quite the jetsetter, thick sarcasm intended.
