Hola, Sneakers! Welcome back to Sneaky Dragon, the podcast with air miles.
Apologies for the lateness of this week’s show, but we had a lot going on.
This week, the show is in four parts:
Part 1
Take a trip with Dave and Ian to the Hergé Museum in Belgium. You can listen in on their conversation over the incessant thrum of their rental car engine. (Apologies for the sound quality of this part of the show. We got what we got. If it’s too terrible, you can skip ahead to 1:00:49 and listen to…)
Part 2
Ian and Dave record a short conversation in a Parisian laundromat before self-consciousness causes them to scupper the recording. (Once again, apologies for the sound quality – it’s recorded in a laundromat – and if it’s too noisy, you can jump ahead to 1:23:35 and the start of…)
Part 3
The most listenable part of the show as it was recorded in the relative quiet of a Paris hotel room. Dave and Ian have their usual wide-ranging conversation and even get around to asking the…
Question of the Week: Have you ever been scammed before?
Sub-question of the Week: Do you have a bad travel story?
Part 4
Dave pops in for a highly topical Top 5 songs: Airplanes! For your entertainment, Dave spins…
Top 5 Songs – Airplanes
- Peter’s Pipers – “Airplane” – Philips Records single b/w “I Didn’t Believe Her”, 1968 – 3:15:59
- Destroyer – “It’s Gonna Take an Airplane” – Your Blues, 2004 – 3:21:33
- Pete Brown & Piblokto! – “Aeroplane Headed Woman” – Thousands on a Raft, 1970 – 3:26:32
- Howlin’ Wolf – “Mr. Airplane Man” – Chess Records single (b-side to “I’ve Been Abused”), 1959 – 3:38:28
- The Free Design – “McCarran Airport” – Cosmic Peekaboo, 2001 – 3:44:03
Bonus song
- The Three O’Clock – “Jet Fighter” – Sixteen Tambourines, 1983 – 3:47:50
Thanks for listening.
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I write tonight while still listening to your enthralling trip! What an adventure, I have to say I’m envious listening to your trip in progress.
I was scammed once in a really bad way and looking back on it, I have to admit that had I not been so greedy in the moment of it happening I wouldn’t have fallen for the scam. It was New Year’s Eve, 1991 and I was in a not so nice part of Dallas. A stranger approached me asking for help, saying he just arrived in the country and if I could help him he’d pay me with a huge roll of money he had on him. He needed to find a hotel to stay at so we drove around a bit until he suggested we stop at this big hardware store. He approaches another man and asks for help from him too, little did I know this was his accomplice. So now I’m driving both men around when the first man asks me how much money I had and that he would give me his if he knew I could trust him with my money. We went to the bank where I withdrew $1500.00, my savings I was holding onto for my upcoming honeymoon. We then went to a nearby shopping area where all he asked was for me to trust him with my money for a few minutes, then he would pay me his money for my trust. The second man assured me he wouldn’t let anything happen to it and walked away with the first man around a building. Of course they walked around a corner with all the money and I never saw either of them again. Greed is a terrible thing and all along I thought I’d double my $1500 this entire time. It was professional mind-fuckery at it’s finest and I fell for it like a chump, a greedy chump. Dave was correct when your mind starts racing and you run through a gambit of fleeting feelings and “what if’s” immediately afterwards. Crazy thoughts of traveling back in time to stop yourself or how to stop these men enter your mind. I called the police and they met me at my apartment and eventually I visited their department to I.D. the men from a binder of photos. The police told me this maneuver was famously called “A Pigeon Drop” and I would likely never see my money again. These guys were probably half-way to Houston by this time to prey upon another greedy chump. They also said I was lucky to have only lost $1500 and that these scam artists can usually get a whole lot more.
I learned something that day as I entered the new year, not to let greed drive you and that nobody would ever part with that amount of money so easily.
The only time I’ve ever travelled off the “safe path” was on a trip to Chicago with a stay over in St. Louis, Missouri. My Brother and I took the wrong exit and drove into East St. Louis on our way to the hotel. Trying to find the hotel, we and strayed off the interstate, into East St. Louis, which is in Illinois right over the Missouri state line. East St. Louis is know for being the dangerous side of St. Louis, it looked like that scene with Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith from “The Bonfire of the Vanities” or maybe even Gotham City. We had to stop and call the hotel from a payphone and find out where we went wrong. As we did this, we were getting noticed by some really scary locals, we obviously didn’t belong there. The hotel gave me directions and we turned around and headed back to the Missouri state line, safely to our hotel in St. Louis. I’ve never seen such a dangerous part of a city like that since.
I’m heading back to listen to the rest of the latest episode. Thanks for sharing your exploits with all of us, I for one am finding it fascinating!
Sneak back to Vancouver safely guys!!
I wasn’t personally scammed, but the theatre company I was working box office for was. A business manager was hired who had worked for another theatre organization in town so he wasn’t vetted properly. He was kind of a chameleon and told different people different things to gain their trust. He claimed to have an MBA from Harvard, he’d flown fighter jets in Vietnam, he’d lived in Japan, he was a writer working on a spec script for The Golden Girls. He made a point of telling everyone he was gay. I don’t know if he was or not, but due to the AIDS crisis, the arts community was being very supportive of the gay community. In those days, we were a strictly cash business and I’d lock up thousands and thousands of dollars in the safe each weekend. But it turned out but not much of the money was being deposited at the bank. The box office reports I’d fill in after every show went missing too so there wasn’t any way to prove how much money was stolen so the company didn’t end up pressing charges.
Worst experience during a trip was running low on cash (before I had a credit card) on a road trip across Canada and only being able to afford a room in a hotel over a dive bar in Bathurst, New Brunswick, where a live rock band was playing hours past midnight.
I guess this one is a scam. It wasn’t overly painful for me or expensive for us, but it was still an uncomfortable situation for us. We were in LA and went to Melrose to hit a few shops. Coming out of one, as we walked up to our car with BC plates, we were approached by this very big guy (he towered over Dave) who got right in his space and asked for $5 for a tomato. When Dave tried to say no another guy moved in from the side; they had him bent backwards over the car. Dave had to cough up the money and in return was handed what was by then a very crushed tomato. Apparently legal; not robbery or extortion as goods were exchanged.
I’ve been approached a couple of times with the ‘my wife is in hospital and I need money for the bus’ scam, and have always said no, but one time in Vancouver when I was there with a friend and we were going to see a band in a nearby club, we had the same experience with being approached in the parking lot by a guy whose wife was apparently in hospital in North Van. We brushed him off, and left him in the parking lot with our car and the other vehicles. After the show I drove home. The next morning I found I had a flat tire with a big nail in it. Coincidence? I’ve always thought no.
Worst travel experience? For me, probably our trip to Italy when we ran out of money trying to pay our entrance into the museum that has Michaelangelo’s David. We didn’t have enough money to pay the very nominal entrance fee and we still had to get back to France and spend a few more days there before returning home. After leaving the museum we were out on the street and had to find a pay phone; Dave then had to make some phone calls and do some long distance banking, moving money over. Looking back it was a pretty simple transaction that kept us out of the museum for 1/2 an hour at the most and then we were back on track. We didn’t starve and weren’t publicly embarrassed in any way. But that hung over me like a black cloud for the rest of the trip. I lived in fear every time we went to pay for something, fear that we wouldn’t have enough money, that we wouldn’t be able to get back to France, buy food, get to the airport, pay for our hotel. If it had just been us adults present it wouldn’t have been such a big deal but we had two children with us. Fortunately none of my wildest bad dreams came to reality.
For another one that wasn’t catastrophic but was quite overwhelming at the time: when I was 9 my mom took us to the UK for the first time. My brother was 7. It was our first time in a plane. The flight from Vancouver to London usually takes 8-9 hours but we had to make a stop in Edmonton first, making the flight a little longer. Then when we got to London, the baggage handlers were on strike (I often wonder now if one of those guys was Freddie Mercury). Anyway, we circled over London for what seemed like a day but was probably an hour then got diverted to Frankfurt. We sat there in the airport for a day. I fell asleep on a bench and ended up having an awkward moment when I kicked out in my sleep and kicked some Mid Eastern man who had also fallen asleep on my bench right in the head. We both woke up with a start and sat there looking at each other for a while; I didn’t know what to do. Finally we got to fly to London and we took a taxi to the hotel. My brother was so tired by that time that he would fall deeply asleep anoywhere; fell asleep in the taxi, was hard to wake up, then when they were taking the luggage out of the taxi he lay down on the top of the stone wall in front of our hotel and fell asleep again. We got into the hotel and were starving but room service was closed because it was so late, but the hotel kindly sent up the world’s best cheese sandwiches and some glasses of milk for us. Then it was the middle of the night but we were up so we went for a walk; for some reason we were walking down what seemed to be back alleys with big dumpsters outside of fast food restaurants; in particular I remember a Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remember thinking that everyone was speaking what I thought was Italian. It was very disorienting – not my vision of what London was supposed to be – but also exciting for a little farm girl from the west coast of Canada.