Long day’s journey into night
Mount Ranier in the gloaming
It has been a long day of travel. I left Asheville at 7:15am eastern, headed to Atlanta, spent three hours there and then was all set to leave when a woman on our flight got sick on medication and had to be taken off the plane. That set us back an hour and half and I missed my connection from Salt Lake City to Vancouver.
Impressed though with Delta Airlines. While we were in the air their “Irregular Operations Team” was hard at work getting everyone rebooked on different flights (and in some cases different carriers.) the captain came back twice to reassure us that no one had Ebola and that all our connections would be taken care of. In flight wifi meant that we could check our new itineraries en route. When I arrived in Salt Lake, it was a simple matter to print out new boarding passes and I even caught a first class upgrade to Seattle. Now I’m at SEA-TAC, sated with some salmon and a bitter northwest IPA at the tail end of my second three hour layover awaiting the final leg home to Vancouver. Once I get there it will be a train downtown and a car2go out to Horseshoe Bay to meet the 1230 water taxi. I should be home by 1am, which will mark 21 hours of travel today, about two hours longer than the last time I went to Australia.
I have managed to get through a third of Bruce Cockburn’s new memoir, several saved up Instapaper articles, some Radiolab and Tapestry podcasts and some ideas for future inquiries about things. So not a bad day. Just a long one. Four hours to go.
I hear you!
I arrived in Calabar yesterday after about 50 hours of travel/transit. A few hours of plane sleep, but no horizontal time. But always accompanied by the kindness of folk. In Abuja airport yesterday I arrived about 6am. After making my way through all the mechanics of customs and security and all I was through to wait for my final connection -which of course was delayed. Only a little canteen was open and I went to buy a bottle of water. I had no Nigerian money and that was all they could access. The young woman looked at me and smiled and said, “Sir, you must be very thirsty,” and she gave me the bottle.