Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Lots of travel!

Yesterday I got on a plane around 12:30. I got off a different plane around 6:30. I spent 12 hours (almost) in the air.
I'm not bad at math. I flew from the east coast over to Hawaii. The time zone change kept messing with me. It was bright for a really long time. I didn't get why I was hungry, then realized I should have had lunch 4 hours previously.
The first plane, BWI to ORD, was a tiny little puddle jumper. I kept hitting my head on the ceiling when I was trying to walk down it. I had to check my carry on planeside. Mercifully, we were only on that plane for 2 hours. It was so small and uncomfortable.
We landed plenty early, but they didn't let us taxi in for a while because there was a different plane at our gate. So, by the time I was waiting in the jet bridge for my carry on it was already the time when our connecting flight was supposed to board.
We ran through the airport quite a long way. We had to go from the tail end of one spoke in to the center, and way out to the very end of another spoke. But, luckily, it seemed as if our next plane was not boarding on time, even though the information board said otherwise. Did we have time for the restrooms? To get food? I scampered up to the desk to ask. At first the guy seemed to expect that I was going to yell at him or something, he seemed a bit astonished that I was happy. 10 minutes! Restroom, sandwich, chips and sodas to eat as soon as we were allowed to sit on the plane. We were so hungry!
We boarded and waited. Ate our chips. Finally, we were off. The first four hours of the trip we didn't really get bored; we spent the time looking out at the scenery. We figured out where we were by comparing big landmarks to a small map. We saw gorgeous mountains and big rivers. The coastline was hugged by clouds. And then we were over the ocean. Initially, that was exciting. Then we realized we had 5 more hours of flying and no more scenery. Sometimes the clouds were pretty, but it was mostly just a vast expanse of sameness.
The more tired we got the more we realized that our day had been bloated with daylight. Our bodies wanted sunset, but we kept flying towards the sunny afternoon.  We were too excited and uncomfortable to sleep.
Towards the end of the flight, hunger won out against sticker shock, and our wonderful flight attendant gave us a sandwich and chips and then she didn't even charge us. Such nice people on that flight.
And then we were in Hawaii.
The airport, so cool. The scenery, so pretty.
We met our friend and she took us home.
We went out for great Indian food. Our bodies thought it was 3am. We finally saw the sun set. Drunk with tiredness, I fell into bed at 10 and slept (mostly) through until morning.

No comments:

Post a Comment