My 1973 Monte Carlo encased in ice and snow when I returned from my, mostly tropical, trip around the world.

I boarded the plane with three flights ahead. A stopover in Honolulu to go through customs and immigration and then a change of airlines from Philippine Airlines to American Airlines for the transcontinental flight to Philadelphia.

Once on the plane, the middle-aged Filipino woman sitting next to me had carried on two large shopping bags at her feet. She told me that she was from the Sacramento area.  When I asked what she was taking back to California, she said simply, "Fish."  I didn't smell anything, so I didn't ask anything more.  When we landed, I got off the plane and went through the customs and immigration stations.  It was my only time in Hawaii, but I had no time or money to stay and tour.  I'd much rather have gone to Easter Island than walk the sands of Waikiki.

When we got back on the plane, I noticed that my seatmate had only one bag.  She said flatly, "Customs took the fish."  I still wonder if they only took half the fish or if she had something else in the second bag.

The flights seemed overly long and I was glad that I only flew from the Philippines to the Hawaiian Islands. A nonstop flight across the entire Pacific would've been a killer for me. I did my usual. I got up several times and walked the aisles. Taking the kinks out of my sitting so long in one place. I have heard since that is a very good way to avoid blood clots.

At the airport in San Francisco, my friend, Jack Swanson, and his family met me.  His three sons were all taking pictures with flash cameras.  It was a bit embarrassing until he told me there was no film in their cameras. It was just a prank. But I felt for a moment what it was like to be chased by paparazzi. Now it's anyone with a cell phone. They stayed with me until my connecting flight left for Philadelphia. It was good to see them. I returned later several times to their hospitality at their home.

I had never taken a transcontinental flight and was quite pleased with the service that I got from American Airlines. The stewardesses were all wearing paper dresses. Shining more like gold foil than paper. I'm sure they were quite light to wear, but they were probably too warm and because they were stiff, and short, would ride up in the back whenever the girls bent over to help anyone. But I didn't look, being the gentleman I was. As if lying would help here.

There was a lot of snow in Philadelphia. Yet I was pleased to see my brother Roger and his daughter Kelley in his 1966 Porsche 912 to easily navigate the snowy roads. When we arrived at Roger's house my car had been buried in front of Roger's house most of the time I was gone. But the next morning when I finished breakfast, Roger had it all cleaned off and warmed up for my six-hour drive back home. 

I returned to West Virginia and dove into my work at the University. The head of the department was worried because I was a week over my plan and he had actually attempted to try to locate me. My box of souvenirs arrived a couple of months later. The cardboard box was covered with a very tight coating of plastic and a message from the Post Office, "Received in Oregon, badly damaged."

The cardboard on the outer part of the box was completely flexible as though it had been pulverized. I opened the box with trepidation. To my surprise, everything was intact and nothing was broken except the loop handle where it was attached to the picnic basket and been forced to near breaking when the box was thrown in the hold of a ship with hundreds of others.

Vitoon later wrote that when he received his metal trunk at the docks he was required to pay as much to pick it up as he had paid in Manhattan to ship it. Of those American products like the plastic orange portable TV ("I don't care about the TV inside, I like the plastic housing") were received in Thailand as no longer bargains, but expensive purchases from all those shipping charges.

I never got the opportunity to travel overseas again, but the trip and those exotic places remain on my mind and I'd like to return to them someday.

This ends all of the tales of my youth that I didn't tell in my autobiography, Hanging by a Thread. But there still are many other tales that I could tell and haven't in either of these two books. Some stories were just so interesting or exciting, even horrifying, that they just stuck in my memory. It's nice to let them out so that the reader can decide whether or not my life was worthwhile to live.

Copyright 2021 © Ronald W. Hull

3/31/21