Leaving Seattle

For the most part, I wrote these blogs on the road using the wordpress app on my iPhone. I’ve been back for three weeks now, so I should probably start doing something about uploading them… Apologies in advance that they get absurdly detailed on rather boring details. I was passing the time, alone, and wanting to document everything so I’d remember later. I’ll probably be editing to add in various details and hope to add photos to later entries. I’ll also roll them out over time a bit so as not to overwhelm anyone who will actually take the time to read these.

FYI, my flight left Seattle at 6:35AM, was set to arrive in NY at 3:00PM. The second leg departed from NY at 6:00PM to arrive at about 7:00AM in London.

On the flight to New York. Won the first round of trivia on the plane. Now watching Mythbusters on satellite about yawning contagion. Yeah, can’t stop yawning. The 3.5 hours sleep last night probably isn’t helping. Ideally I would stay awake for this flight then sleep on the flight to London arriving at 7AM. In reality, if sleep wants to happen, I should probably let it.

I just paid $6 for a movie on a tiny screen. Milk. Must pay attention.

Movie is still on, but I just wanted to point out I can see Chicago from here, over Lake Michigan right now.

There certainly are a lot of peanuts and peanut products on this plane. Seems so strange now.

Finished the movie just under the wire. Starting descent. Have to turn off phone momentarily.

This is so weird. I’m at JFK. I got an automated phone call telling me the flight is one hour delayed. The internet tells me it’s one hour delayed. Nothing at the airport indicates any kind of delay. Charging phone and the reserve charge thing.

That was a very enjoyable if not productive second flight. The plane departed late because it was going to be a shorter than planned flight. Apparently they can’t land at heathrow before a certain time. They left an hour late and arrived early. The plane was a 2-3-2 configuration. I had a window in the back. An 18 year old guy sat next to me. I assumed he’d be annoyed by anyone not in his age group and assumed I’d be left alone to try to sleep or to play with the games or watch the free on demand movies. He looked oddly familiar to me. I’m not sure how we started up the conversation, but we ended up chatting for hours. And not in the “will you please stop talking to me” way. You see, he’s a shockingly well travelled, educated, and knowledgable teenager. Turns out he’s been to over 60 countries and has grand plans for more. It took a lot of encouragement for him to believe I really wanted to hear his travel stories. It was neat to see someone else able to rattle off names of African nations while pointing to a blank map of the continent. Anyway, it was fun to hear the srories. He did enjoy the conversation too, BTW. He was so pleased by all of his travel so far that day including meeting rapper Ludacris at the airport in Miami and loaning him a dime. Heh. He still had another long flight to Helsinki to go.

But it meant little time for sleep. I played a couple movies/tv shows and curled up in uncomfortable to my neck positions. I wasn’t aware so much of the sleep, but apparently I got some. I woke up to find that they had served breakfast. My seat mate had grabbed one for me, thankfully. Large dinner, breakfast, free games, and movies. I love international flights.

So with still little sleep under my belt for the equivalent of two nights I finally arrived in London at about 7am.