Concerning Large Tin Boxes With Very Small Uncomfortable Seats, Of Textile Travel Containers, and Other Strange Things

I am sorry I haven't managed to post about my flight now that its almost a week behind us. I have had a maniacal schedule for the last week, no time for jet lag or anything else like that, and most of it is post worthy, but I will only cover the flight in detail now as it promises to be a long enough post. I should be able to get around to some posting this week as things seem to have slowed down slightly, which is good because it gives less things to blog about, and more time to blog in. Both of these are blessings now.

I am now in America as I write this. Getting here, however, was something of a trip. I was up for about 9 hours before we drove to the airport, Dad and I, and we got checked in, sat around for an hour, got on the airplane and watched some idiot music videos on the flight. Completely unoriginal. Utterly. There were repeated elements in every video, it was pretty bad. Funny though. So we got to Frankfurt, wandered for a while and got on our second flight about two hours after we got off of the first plane. So far so good. We were on a big huge Boeing 747 with something close to 300 other passengers and attendants and such. It was a big bird, and she was full. Very full. So we find ourselves lugging our cary-ons down the aisle, to arrive at our seats having been claimed by some mother dressed up like a nun, the hair thing was perfect. Kinda funny. At any rate, we didn't really care, so we stood there and a stewardess came up and realized that the lady had our seats, but we weren't fussing about it, and so went out of her way to get us some new seats. Being nice counts in airports. It really does. So half an hour latter, we are sitting in some seats, but the plane isn't going anywhere. Apparently what had happened was we had missed our slot, and in a huge airport like Frankfurt, that means you are in trouble. So we waited to the next available opening, which was another half an hour late. Our flight took off an hour late, and we had scheduled only an hour and fifteen minutes to get on our connecting flight, and it was domestic, which means we had to go through customs, and I had a bag of dried hibiscus flowers with me, a substance that always gets through eventually, but has to be declared. The reason I bring things like this is because coming from Yemen requires that we be "randomly" run through agriculture anyways, so you might as well give them a reason to do it.

The flight was mostly uneventful. There were two movies on the flight, one of them was Wild Hogs. Do not watch this movie. Excessively dumb. Excessively. The second was called Music and Lyrics or something like that. It was about a musician from the eighties or something who is coming back to do a single with a huge pop star, needs to find a lyricist, eventually finds one, and writes a song. I loved this movie, the pop star was a wreck and way over done, but everything else was fantastic. Ironic, without rubbing it in, witty, musical with a reason to be musical, and intellectual, with the exception of the pop star. No action, so this must have been a really good movie, because I usually only really like action movies, but this one was somehow more than just a drama even though there was no action to speak of in the movie. Highly recommended, moving on.

So we land an hour late, fifteen minutes to get to our next flight. This is where the story gets interesting. We dash through customs and immigration, streak down to agriculture, get everything waved on after we had opened one suitcase up, and sprint back up to catch the bus to terminal three to catch our airplane. World record for getting through Chicago O'Hare airport. Amazing. Then we realize that we are holding the tracking tag to one of the suitcases... Uncool. Very uncool. That was the bag that had my entire video game collection, half of my library, all my memorabilia, my entire DVD collection (hardly worth mentioning, it is composed of The Matrix.) and about half of my wardrobe. I pack light. And its gone. Dad says for good. So I am freaking out. Very much freaking out.

At this stage, we had lost the more valuable of my two bags, missed a flight, and missed my drivers ed class that I was supposed to be there for. Bad. So we wandered around, and found that the flight had been rescheduled. All well and good. Only thing is that we have now missed that flight as well due to the fact that our bag is missing some where in the bowels of O'Hare international airport. The place is huge. Gigantic. Enormous. Big. Enough said. So we managed to reschedule another flight, by this time we had learned that we needed to file a missing bag statement once we had gotten to our destination, and they would work on finding the bag and getting it to us, and we sat down to wait. We had about three hours of lay over time between frantic-get-on-next-airplane rush and the time our flight was actually scheduled to take off for Indianapolis. So Dad fished out a phone and started calling people. I got to talk with Talle then, and have been able to communicate several times with him since. That was a lot of fun. He hasn't changed very much at all since we lit off our last explosion...

So we eat, wander some, and vaguely meander over to the terminal where our flight is supposed to be. We looked up the gate, and it was gate 16. So we went to gate 16. Nothing happening. About ten minutes latter, I got up to check it again, and it had switched to gate 18. Fine, could have been misread or something, so we moved to gate 18. Then 11B then gate 10. By this time I was starting to wonder if they were just playing musical gates with us for the fun of it, or if there was a reason for it, or if it was all just to the cause of universal misunderstanding or what, but it was kinda funny. So this gate actually says that it is going to Indianapolis, it was the first gate to actually have anything of the like anywhere, and it started calling numbers, and one of the numbers was ours, so we made it all the way onto the plane without further mishap.

It was a short flight, only about an hour, and the plane flew low compared to the other two birds I had already been on, and we had window seats for the first time, so I could see the ground and all the cars sliding across the endless black pavement lines. For some reason, this was far cooler than just looking at pictures on Google Earth. Google Earth is good for maps and its 3D at times, but this was all real, not just a computer screen. Perspective shifted to allow us to watch shadows shiver across roads as we buzzed over. I don't remember the last time I had been on a really low flying bird for so long. It was fun.

When we finally (I'm starting to get tired of this post...) got to Indy, somehow, that lost bag had made it too. In fact, looking at the tag that had supernaturally appeared on it, it had arrived several hours before we had. Certain proof of Divine providence. I have no other explanation.

More later, I have been having a very eventful life these last few days, life promises to be enjoyable and full for quite a while. So goodnight, Mom, the comment button should be just bellow this last line. (Amazing what Mothers are willing to do to communicate with lost sons... lol. I should see if I can get her to get a blog... If you have a blog, you should tell her that its not all that hard.)