The excitement I feel when I pack my bag is like that of a sled dog when it’s being attached to the sleigh harness. It doesn’t matter how much I enjoy where I am, nothing can compare to the excitement of where I will be next. Perhaps it’s why I rarely experience sadness; as long as I have somewhere to go, I never feel trapped in a particular condition. 

Beyond smelling the jet fuel being pumped into the plane, I listened to a group of young people chattering in a foreign language while watching others try to fit their oversized carry-ons into the overhead bins. I laugh to myself at peoples’ suspension of reality, believing that something they can hardly lift over their head, will fit in a space half the size of the object they’re trying to squeeze into it.

Last year, my dad bought me a backpack that could be separated into two pieces by simply squeezing a couple of clips that secured it together. Not only does this reduce the size of the space I need in the overhead bin, it also allows me to conceal the actual weight of my bag.

Just this morning I was asked to place my bag on the scale. Having anticipated the request, I quickly detached the half with the shoulder straps and placed it on the scale, leaving the other half of the bag on my side of the counter, hidden from the view of the ticket agent. Together they would have exceeded the weight limit, but the half I presented easily cleared the maximum allowance. When I took my bag back, I simply re-clipped the two pieces together and walked away, no one the wiser.

It was the first of two battles I would win with my carry-on baggage that day. Not long after, my “personal item”, which in my case is the bag in which I carry my food, spices, and cooking tools (like a grater) was flagged, and I stood in front of it while the TSA agent went through item by item. When she lifted out the container of peanut butter, I explained to her that it was frozen, advice I’d been given by the last TSA agent who’d confiscated my potentially explosive soft peanut butter. The current agent smiled and replied, “that was good advice; you can keep it”.

I do find it necessary to bring some items to Mexico that you can’t easily acquire there. Things like tea, exotic spices, and peanut butter. To be sure, these things are available in Mexico, just not in the variety that I prefer. Not being big tea drinkers, they only sell black or chamomile teas. Peanut butter is hard to find, and when you do find it, it’s always filled with sugar. On the rare occasions I do find sugar-free peanut butter, the cost is over $10 for a container, so I’ve resorted to muleing my own across the border.

The flight I was on was the first of three I would take to get to Mexico. While I could have flown more directly, I decided to take advantage of an unused ticket I had from last spring. In March, I bought a ticket from Mexico to Las Vegas and another to return. I always buy each direction of a round trip separately as it gives me more flexibility to make changes. In fact, I decided not to return to Mexico in the spring after meeting with my family in Las Vegas. That left me with a return to reschedule at my convenience.

In hindsight, it was not as convenient as I’d hoped. Of course, I had to pay a change fee to change the date of my original ticket. I also had to purchase a ticket to get me to Las Vegas. The cheapest one involved a layover in Los Angeles but arrived in Las Vegas too late for me to reliably catch the Mexico flight so I booked the same flight for the day before. That put me in the position of having to get a hotel room to spend the night in Vegas. I was beginning to think I should have just purchased a new ticket. Still, there was one night in Vegas to be spent. What price can one put on that?

I’d hoped to find a cheap hotel close to the airport, but it turned out to be the weekend of the Electric Daisy Carnival, commonly known as EDC, the largest electronic dance music festival in North America. There was nothing available in the city for under $200 so I settled for a place I’d said I’d never return, the Bungalows Hostel (formerly Hostel Cat), where a bunk bed for the night cost me $75.

It turns out they’d made several improvements since the last time I was there, and it was a great place for people watching since a good number of my hostel mates were attending the festival. The hostel is located in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Fremont Street and the Strip. Now, however, the arts district has developed only a couple blocks of way, something that often happens in neglected neighborhoods. The arts district is filled with shops, restaurants and bars that are a nice break from the shopping malls and crowded buffets of the huge casinos on the strip. 

The rest of the neighborhood hasn’t changed, and I wouldn’t recommend walking anywhere further than the front of the hostel at night, and then only to hop into your Uber. Inside the walls, however, is a different experience. When I first stayed there, all of the rooms, kitchen and common area were in the same building.  Since then, they’d acquired the motel next door and converted each of the single hotel rooms into a dorm room with a total of 6 bunk beds and a shared bathroom. They erected a wall around all of the rooms and created a shared interior space inside the protected compound. It had the feel of a secure military base within enemy territory.

Inside the compound were several seating areas, an outdoor kitchen, lawn games, and covered picnic tables. The kitchen was still within the older main building, but that meant the noises and smells stayed away from the sleeping areas. Colored lights illuminated the space and smooth electronic music spilled from speakers throughout the courtyard.

I was pleased to see they had added curtains to the beds so that you could close yourself off once you were in bed. Not only did it provide privacy, but from my perspective, it provided a boundary between me and the Covid viruses being spewed out from my sleeping companions. 

As I made my bed, with the sheets provided at check-in, the guy in the bunk bed above me apologized in advance that he was going to be coming home late tonight. I replied, “I certainly hope so; you’re in Vegas!” As it turns out, he was headed to the music festival, and I don’t think he actually returned until after I woke up the next morning. For that matter, I’m not sure how many people I actually shared the room with that night.

I awoke at 7 and had to sneak into the kitchen early because it didn’t open until 8, something I find odd since it is not close to any of the sleeping areas. Still, I justified heating water as not actually cooking so technically I’m not sure I was breaking the rules. I sat outside with my tea for the next hour watching people stagger in from the Music Festival. It was fun to see the difference in their appearance from the night before when they’d gotten all dressed up and headed out. Now they were coming home at dawn appearing as zombie forms of themselves from the night before.

I headed over to the arts district to my favorite breakfast spot in Vegas so I could grab a large meal before I left, hoping that it would hold me over until I arrived in Mexico City that evening. I used the 24-hour bus pass I purchased the day before to get me back to the airport and headed to TSA security with my electronic boarding pass. Though I had put the peanut butter in the hostel freezer the night before and somehow actually remembered to retrieve it in the morning, it turns out the hostel freezer wasn’t working sufficiently enough to keep the peanut butter frozen, and the TSA woman confiscated it from me. So while I was excited to be traveling again, it was with a bit of sadness that I would not be doing so with my coveted peanut butter.