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The Trip Home



Resuming (and concluding!)  my travel notes ... at my hotel, guests received three keys. One of them was a "key" in the old-fashioned sense, a metallic thing with a jagged edge meant to fit a particular lock. That was for the room's wetbar.

The other two keys were "keys" in the new-fangled sense, magnetized cards. One of these was for the door to my room, the other allowed me to work the elevator. This was the first hotel I have ever been in at which I received such a key panoply.

When my trip was done, I flew home. This was part of my design all along. The train one way, the plane the other.

I had to make some sacrifices. A couple of the souvenir trinkets I had purchased in my wanderings around time and town were not, I decided, the sort of things with which one easily gets through airport security in this age, so I left them for some future inhabitant to room 910 to discover for himself in the drawer of the bedtable.

But even having made those sacrifices, I didn't get through security all that easily anyway. As family and close friends know, I have a benign lump on my right leg, on the outside, a little below the hip. It is not a difficulty, and is not even noticable if I am normally dressed. Unfortunately, it was noticeable to the airport body scanner.

It appears I was briefly suspected of disreputable intentions until a security guard got all touchy-feely with my hip and satisfied himself that was me.

I did get on the airplane, though. Also, by the time I was on the plane I had with me, in my carry-on, the proper number of gifts with specific San Antonio connections, as protocol demands.

One of them was a bobble-head doll version of Roddy the Roadrunner, the mascor of the University of Texas at San Antonio sports teams. Go, UTSA!  The proud new owner of the bobble head is my brother Paul.
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