Flying Home

Up and at ‘em 6am, breakfast and a taxi to the airport gets us to the check-in counter a little early. Normally we print out our boarding passes, but the Holiday Inn where we are staying can’t help us easily do this.  We get boarding passes and go hang out at the Star Alliance lounge. We can come here because we have flown over 50,000 miles last year on Star Alliance airlines like US Airways and Lufthansa. They have 3 kinds of champagne, and it’s sort of a ritual to have a farewell mimosa before we leave Europe. There’s an Airbus A380 on the runway. We fly to Frankfurt, then to Philly, then to Norfolk.

We board as soon as we can and stow our luggage. The handle on my carry-on red bag is broken and won’t go down all the way, sticking out so that I have to load the luggage the long way in the overhead instead of wheels in first. The flight’s not full, though, so there’s no problem. We get to Frankfurt and visit the lounge for one more mimosa and some spargel suppe.

On the international flight, I am sitting in a window seat, 9A, with George and Morgan in front of me. Usually, I have pretty good luck with seat partners this way, but there’s a guy in 9B who is from North Carolina. When he finds out that George is from Morganton, he launches into a 20 minute history lecture telling me who the Morgan of Morganton was. OMG, it’s interesting, but I’m not in the mood. While he is talking, I get my iPod and my earphones out, hoping he’ll get the message. Nope. I get my pillow out and blow it up. Will he get the message now? No. I know I should just tell him that I would like peace and quiet, but I just can’t, I really believe that he’ll be done soon. Finally the story ends, we take off, and I fall asleep.

The best plan for the westbound flight is to wait until the meal is served, watching a movie at the same time, sleep for 2 hours, then wake up and watch as many movies as you can until we hit Philadelphia. Due to the annoying seatmate, I fall asleep early, wake to lunch, and fortunately, I can watch a movie. My seatmate advises me on which movie to watch, and when I watch it later in the flight, he has to make comments on what is going to happen. I want to punch him, but restrain.

Our flight arrives in Philly, we breeze right past the baggage claim and see that our flight is delayed, but the earlier flight is also delayed, so we get on that one and head on home.

We get home around 7pm, and Morgan wants to go to Target to get Super Mario Galaxy 2 for his Wii. Sure, gotta drive my car, which has been sitting in the garage. The Mini won’t start, bummer. The van goes, though.

At 9pm, it’s like 3am, and the goal is to try to stay awake til at least 10pm.  Our cats, Shadow and Smoky are glad to see us, but were rather upset at us being gone. There is cat pee on the comforter on our bed (George’s side) so the bed must be stripped and made. They have also left tons of cat hair everywhere and I’ll deal with that later. In my own bed for the first time in 33 days. Good night!

Note: I’m going to take a few days break from the blog. When not traveling, I’ll catch up with you all just a couple of times a week, for the two weeks. See you then!