Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
I’m writing from a hotel room in Toronto. Well is it a hotel? Not exactly. I think they call this a “guesthouse” now. Somewhere between a hotel and an AirBnB. You text to check-in. There’s no reception, but no exorbitant cleaning fee either.
So here we are, 2023. In reality it’s like someone took a modest old apartment building and painted it the last six Pantone colors of the year.
Travel feels full of these mashups and tech-fed confusions now. As I left the airport on Monday, I had an eye out for a ride-share pickup area. Near the terminal exit a man mumbled at me about a counterfeit cab ride - something that seems to happen at every airport in the world, still - but I knew better and kept walking. Outside was a good old fashioned taxi rank with a short line. With no ride-share signage in sight, I took my chances.
Still queasy from a bumpy ride on a crowded and ancient jet, with a media system akin to PCs of yesteryear, I cracked the window for some fresh air. The driver seemed to want me to take the lead on getting us into town. After I gave him the address he said, “Do you live there?”
“No,” I said. “Why, does that affect how we’ll get there?”
He turned away and punched the address into the GPS.
Halfway through the ride, passing through those neighborhoods beside airports that seem the same all around the developed world, with the cold rain intermittently splattering my face, I felt no more comfortable. The driver answered a call on speaker (SPAM), then hung-up, and was gas/brake, gas/brake all the way, like a bored kid on a bicycle. It was then I remembered that this was a cab. A time machine. Not only did I not know how much this ride was going to cost in advance, how could I give this guy a crappy rating, too?
I thought of all the least offensive and potentially life-changing ways I might be able to tell him he was a terrible driver and should consider another career, but ultimately didn’t have the energy. Tapping is so much easier.
Instead I got the hell out of the cab and rushed to my street-side room. Where the sound of tramcars rolling by, over a lumpy old patch of track, has been shaking my bed and waking me intermittently ever since. Ca-cunk. Ca-cunk. Maybe next year they’ll finally be hovering.
Why didn’t I Google all this? Airport Uber availability, room reviews. Or better yet, ask a human?
Self-checkouts and automated ordering systems abound up here. I haven’t even stopped at a bank for cash. Instead I tap here - Ding! And there - Ding! Like nothing costs anything at all. Rushing in and out of the guesthouse, with no staff to so much as wave at, it all makes for a rather lonely experience. Even the waitstaff, should you be lucky enough to encounter one, run the same old lines that have infected worldwide dining: “How are the first few bites tasting?” Ewww. “Got much planned for today/tonight?” Good god, why would anyone really care?
But when the phone buzzes in the morning and my kids are right there on the screen, draped in that unmistakable California morning light, things aren’t quite so bleak. Regular phone calls are tricky with kids. They’re a visual medium, and just seeing each other means something.
So after waving goodbye, I pick myself up and give this muddled-up tech world its due. Before logging into Instagram again and wanting to choke myself to death with a complimentary coffee pod.