Thursday, September 8, 2011

1/5 of the way there

I estimate that there are 21 hours to this trip from door to door, and I'm officially 4 hours into this excursion.  Just landed at O'Hare in Chicago.  I quickly decided that yes, $6.95 is a decent price to surf the web for about 2 hours between flights.

The good news, my ear did not explode, and neither did the cat (sorry, you had to read the last post to get that).  So I feel a bit more confident that neither my burgeoning ear tumor nor head will explode before I arrive in Beijing.

The cat had me up at 3:00 a.m. for breakfast, and at that point it was useless trying to sleep again, so I watched infomercials.  4:45 came fast, my mom was bang on time to pick me up and we were at Logan by 6:40.  Check in was smooth, resisted Starbucks (the caffeine taper begins NOW...time to suffer!  I will regret not tapering off like I should have) and read the Globe.  Very smooth flight with the exception of the very ill off duty flight attendant who passed out in front of me.  Should I fall to the same fate, he will be hunted down and taken care of.

For those keeping score at home, the "this will take the edge off" drug of choice is Xanax.  Given that I've never taken it before and don't know how I'll respond to it, I'm hesitant to try it out at 35,000 feet for fear I'll end up the cause of a TSA-diverted flight as I run naked up and down the aisles and need to be restrained and arrested.  I feel fine now, not terribly stressed about the duration of the flight, but who knows what will happen.  But maybe Xanax and my aisle dance will liven up the flight and help kill some time.

Boston folks, the sun is out here.  It felt like I landed in a foreign country when I saw it, it was so damn dreary when I left this morning.  And I'm embarassed to admit I had no idea what that large body of water was we came in over as we landed here.  Surely a Great Lake?  Maybe I need to travel a bit more in this country...

So now it's 2 more hours in Chicago and off I go.  Talk to you from China!

No comments: