Whining about wine

I completed the last leg of my "around the world" airline ticket today, which means I left Santa Rosa, CA, this morning and flew to Washington Dulles Airport to pick up my car from my parents then head up the coast back to Boston (by way of New York, of course). I do have some fun stories from Santa Rosa that I'll share in a different blog, but I had to write this one first because something happened today that really struck a nerve with me and I think people should know about it.

I'm a pretty easy going traveler. With the number of airline flights and the different places I've been staying every night, I kind of resigned myself at the beginning of the trip to face the fact that I was going to lose an item here or there... or even damage something beyond repair. I did - I lost my wash cloth and toothbrush on the way to Athens, along with my cell phone charger somewhere in Italy, on to follow that by ditching my cell phone in Rhodes then throwing my digital camera in a pond in Sydney. None of this really phased me. I've been feeling more relaxed over the past month than I think I've ever felt in my life. To borrow one of my favorite quotes from a friend of mine after he'd gotten back from boot camp "Some old lady could throw a watermelon at my head in the grocery store, and I wouldn't care."

But I did find myself caring today, and quite angry and frustrated with society in my homeland. I've had a wonderful time and part of me wants to keep traveling, but I miss home and I'm happy I'll be back in Boston in a few of days.

So what was it that tipped off my anger at the current state of my world... it was 3 bottles of wine. Yah, I'm whining about 3 bottles of wine. My Aunt and Uncle live in wine making capitol of the US. To me, tasting wine is like appreciating a fine art and there is no better place in the US to do this than Sonoma county. We visited 2 wineries on the way to picking my grandmother up for dinner because we had an hour to spare and the wineries were just around the corner from where she lives. The next day we stopped in Calistoga for lunch on the way to visiting the Petrified Forrest (very cool) and the Old Faithful Geyser. We stepped into a little gift store that happened to have beehive inside. There also happened to be some wines for tasting from a small Napa vineyard, so of course we had to taste those. At these 3 stops, we managed to collect 3 very yummy wines (we probably tasted about 18 total) that I wanted to take home.

Knowing that the federal aviation regulations stipulate that I cannot carry on more than 3 oz containers of fluid, we all knew that I'd have to check my 3 bottles of wine through to Dulles Airport. My aunt and I spent a good amount of time packaging the wines for travel, and the good packaging more than paid off. I got to the airport expecting that I could ask the bag agent to place one of those nifty red "fragile" stickers on my wine, but my wine was tagged and haphazardly thrown onto the baggage belt before I could say anything. I asked the baggage agent to remove my bag from the belt because I was going to request a "fragile" sticker. The agent said, "I'm sorry maam, but we don't give those out anymore, and even if we did, it's too late to retrieve your bag."

The questions started swirling in my head and the first question that I managed to get out of my mouth was, "Why don't you give out fragile stickers?" Apparently, American Airlines has been sued up the wazoo because things with "fragile" stickers were still broken in transit. I asked if someone could please retrieve my bag so I could take a sharpie and write fragile on it, but by then, it would have delayed my plane. I asked another agent, who seemed more interested in actually listening to me if he could find my wine and write "fragile" on it for me, and miss evil came over and told him not to because they were worried about me suing them. I then asked if I could purchase some travel insurance for that case. Again, the answer was an adamant "no". Apparently AA took this issue to courts ruled that the airline has no liability whatsoever and cannot be held accountable for damage to checked personal items and therefore they cannot warn their baggage handlers that they are throwing around 3 full glass containers.

It wasn't so much the wine that I was upset about. It more the ridiculousness of the whole situation. I started trying to assign blame to large corporations bullying people in court because they are able to hire better lawyers, but then I thought about all the stupid people out there who sue the city because the tripped and scraped their knee on the sidewalk. Then I thought about how American Airlines isn't really doing all that well, and how they're trying to save a penny any way they can. Then there's the FAA regulations preventing me from protecting my wine that's sort of a paranoid regulation and I more than understand how it evolved, but it shouldn't apply to me or the majority of other Americans. I didn't want to give the AA employees a hard time because they're paid to follow rules, but I've always had a problem with people who mindlessly follow rules.

I just got really frustrated with the state of our society. The rules are basically in place because of paranoia and the need for accountability to be held by anyone but oneself. I didn't experience anything like this while I was outside the country, so I was bit surprised at the intense emotions I was feeling. For a country that was founded on the principle that everyone has their own mind and their own say, I'm frustrated that so many people act like drones because they are scared to take any other action.

(The pictures were advertisements I saw in the Dallas Ft. Worth Airport, where I had a 2 hour layover, and had nothing better to do than scout adds... these were funny and quite appropriate. The wine did make it, but the styrofoam inside the cardboard box was completely destroyed. I do have a happier Santa Rosa blog, which will probably come out soon.)