A Blue Moon and a Silver Mantilla (Travel Tales 5)

Staycationing before a nice screen with a laptop on the side is now really attractive given the ease of contracting Covid19 anywhere—airplanes, taxis, subways, terminals. Why travel to shop when there’s online shopping? Sightseeing and museums? YouTube is the answer—you pay nothing or almost nothing and avoid long lines, going up and down steep stairs, pickpockets, and trudging in rain or hot sun. Broadway and West End or La Scala and Lincoln Center? Watch entire operas and shows online and, if that’s not your trip, there’s Netflix and Spotify.Simultaneous multi-country family gatherings, previously unimaginable, are now clicks away with Microsoft Team and Zoom. My own family is in diaspora but we see and talk to each other while in our respective couches gobbling peanuts in Madrid, DC, New

York, Singapore, Taguig, Makati, and QC.

Of course, there are some things that can’t be virtual—a walk through snowy countryside, Semana Santa in Seville, a wedding at St. Patrick’s, a foggy evening on Nob Hill, freezing in St. Petersburg, graduation at Harvard Yard. Unexpected reunions too, like bumping into Chief Justice Davide at a New York stoplight, former professor Amado A. Castro at Times Square one New Year’s Eve, and long-unseen U.P. classmate Francisco Faustino at a San Diego bookshop.

On the other hand, some things are better virtual, like when I tripped and fell flat on my face on a Constitution Avenue sidewalk in Washington D.C., California hiking and baggage checkins.

One of my dear friends at Stanford, librarian David Allen, was into the great outdoors. I really prefer the cozy indoors, but I went along and tramped the hiking trails with him at Mt. Tamalpais across Golden Gate Bridge and Mt. Hamilton near San Jose. They were easy and David figured I was ready for the big time, namely Henry Coe State Park that, I discovered later, “consists of a series of high ridges separated by steep walled canyons” inhabited by mountain lions.

He should have known he had to relieve me of my backpack and to push me from behind like a bulldozer going uphill. We started at 8 a.m. and by midnight (yes!) I was so bushed that I lay down flat on the stony road gasping, “Leave me here to die.” I lived, revived by the sight of an infinity of stars, sparkling diamonds on the gossamer silver mantilla that is the Milky Way. I’ve not seen such a spectacle before or since and definitely not in Manila. Anyway, about 2 a.m., headlights appeared. Park rangers had noticed our solitary car in the parking lot and a search party was dispatched to look for the bodies. The jeepney ride back was heaven. That was the last time I went hiking, in what David thereafter referred to as Woe Park.

Baggage is absent in virtual travel. My daughter Sandra, age eight, had just recovered from a serious illness and was returning home with my wife from M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas. The rest of us were there to fetch them: three small children, my mother-in-law, and me. Being Pinoy, baggage was at the max—two suitcases/boxes each for check-in and two handcarrieds each, i.e., 14 large checkins and 14 handcarrieds. The flight was HOU-SFO-MNL. I checked the biggies straight to MNL and breathed a sigh of relief.

Too soon, it turned out. It happens only once in a blue moon but the blue moon was then. Heavy fog closed SFO and our plane was diverted to LAX. Baggage was offloaded and we were ordered to find ours and get them to a hotel. It was bedlam with suitcases, boxes, handcarrieds, two spirited preteens, Sandra on crutches with two handcarrieds, three-year-old Amy herself a handcarried and her own two handcarrieds, and my 78-year-old mother-in-law with her handcarrieds plus the previous night’s half-eaten roast chicken.

I was then in my 30s and we managed, but these days I’d rather be locked-down, staycationing.

I lived, revived by the sight of an infinity of stars, sparkling diamonds on the gossamer silver mantilla that is the Milky Way.