Travel Journal, Day One:
We arrive in Barbados two days before embarcation to find only one of our four bags making its appointed rounds on the claim conveyor. This leaves me with but one change of clothes on the cusp of our Amazon adventure: 1 pair white tube socks, 1 pair boxer shorts, 1 twelve-year-old Smiths T-shirt, 1 red sweatshirt, 1 pair cargo pants. As I wear the same cargo pants pretty much every day anyhow, I can't gripe about losing the other pair. That said, lacking spare underwear for hygiene, a bathing suit for swimming, running shoes for running, hiking boots for hiking, dress clothes for dinner on the ship, short pants for lounging, sandals for sandaling, and my blunderbuss for hunting anaconda, I might as well be confined to quarters for the duration.
The Wife is, of course, well-appointed (the surviving bag is hers). As I down consecutive duty-free Cadbury chocolate bars — for strength — in the Bereft of Baggage line, she makes great charitable gestures of offering me loaner clothes. Phutatorius' drag fashion show proceeds in full force in the hotel room the following morning, as he tries to decide which items will earn the most raucous applause from other guests at the Fairmont Royal Pavilion.
A bathing suit is purchased from the hotel gift shop at considerable cost. The Wife doesn't like the fit: she insists on asking the clerk if they carry XL. This might be fine — even flattering — if we were talking about a Speedo cut. But we're not, and the gloves are off: I fall into a squat and distend my abdomen, declaring myself bound and determined to burst the top button off her Eddie Bauer shorts.
O Great and Spiteful Old Testament God, make it Your will to liberate my paunch from this alien and constraining pant-fastener . . .
USAirways tells me now that the bags will find their way to the hotel by nightfall. I can regard this as just another empty assurance — like their promise to deliver up my luggage in the ordinary course of business — or I can take them at their word. Because I am a man who gets by on
hope, I must do the latter.
