David brought me to the airport on Saturday at 7:00 AM. My flight to New York was uneventful even though it was a hard landing.
My first stop was at the duty free shop. Samuel had asked me to bring him a Snickers or Mars bar. Of course I'm very bad at following instructions so instead of getting him one bar I got him a huge bag of mini-bars of mixed Snickers, Mars and a few other flavors.
When I got to JFK it was around 10:30 AM and my boarding time wasn't until 4:30 PM so I had a LOT of time to kill and a lot of energy I needed to burn off. On the other hand I had my backpack and briefcase to lug everywhere. After having some lunch and reading for a bit, I decided to walk around the terminal. A full walk from one end to the other of Terminal B turned out to be a mile so I did that route about 6 times. By now my back was starting to ache and I was sweaty. Perfect environment to prepare for a 10 hour flight.
While walking I realized I was walking across a film set. There were a bunch of people looking in monitors and sitting on those stereotypical director's chairs and there were mics and covered windows and the Airplane gate had a TWA sign on it while in the Delta terminal. (Is TWA still a thing?)
As I continued down the hall I saw a shop that sells only chocolate -- that's MY kind of store. I wanted to know if they had the same bag of chocolates that I had just gotten duty free, because I wanted to see how much money I saved by getting it from the duty free shop. Lo and behold, the chocolate shop charges $5 LESS than the duty free shop! In my next rotation around the terminal I went back to the duty free shop and got a refund. In my last rotation around the terminal I got the bag from the chocolate shop. The nerve!
Finally it was time to board. I sat next to two women who were on their way to Ghana to adopt a little girl. I finally watched The Imitation Game, which I liked a lot. I wish I had gotten to see it with David, but at least I finally got to see it. In the middle of the night I switched to podcasts hoping I would fall asleep. Every time I started to doze off something would bring me back -- first it was the woman next to me who was blowing her nose. She had slept for several hours and was now watching a sad movie.
Then there was a little party across the aisle from me. They were surprisingly quiet, but one woman was standing in the aisle and kept brushing against my shoulder.
I gave up trying when the guy behind me used my seat as leverage to pull himself out of his seat at least half a dozen times. At that point, I started watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Finally we landed. The immigration process was surprisingly fast. While waiting in line for the thermal imaging I noticed a sign encouraging the washing of hands with the hands of several small children. I thought it was really odd that all of the hands were white. Hmmmm.
My normal luggage karma is excellent. My luggage almost always comes off in the first or second batch of luggage. Today was a bit different -- the luggage gods decided I needed to wait with my backpack and briefcase standing amongst my fellow, ripe passengers for a nice long time waiting for my bags to come out. I would have been more worried were it not for the fact that there were so many people still waiting. When they did come out, the two bags came out nearly together.
Samuel and his big smile were, of course, waiting for me. The weather was actually quite pleasant. It was in the 80s and sunny.
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