We got to the airport a little more than two hours before
our first leg – to Houston – and had time to kill. Spent some time on B
Concourse smoking and sipping diet soda. If we go again next year, that smoking
lounge will be gone. Like most airports today, DIA will be completely purged of
smoking by end of 2012. We smokers take pending changes like this in stride – “well,
maybe we’ll have quit by then..” – but we were grateful to nic-up before about
fourteen hours of travel, including a stopover in the proudly smoke-free
Houston Bush Airport.
At the Houston gate, we met a nice couple named Janet and Andrew
from LA, who took up seats near us at the gate. He was English, she from
Southern California. An unlikely pair we thought, but 13 years married (about
our age) and seemed to work well together. They were on their way to Barton-on-Humber to visit his 90-something year old Mum celebrating a birthday, and then westward
to the Bristol area. We had both areas on our itinerary, at least along the way,
and while we offered some vague interest in getting together with them, we both
knew we probably wouldn’t. They were visiting family, we were on vacation and
had plans. We waved at them at the baggage area at Heathrow, but that was that.
Sharon had the window for the nine hour Heathrow leg, which
was fine with me since I planned to sleep (see below) and read, and it was
going to be nighttime the whole way and what good’s a window at night? I was in
the middle seat next to a stony faced black lady clutching a rosary the whole flight
and looking for all the world like she’d rather be anywhere else than on that
plane. So much for casual conversation. Also didn’t help that I had our massive
laptop wedged awkwardly at my feet, forcing my legs together and a little
sideways. Sounds like a minor deal, but almost 9 hours of that was a little
wearying.
I noticed that people on the plane were taking to standing –
just standing, some for an hour or more at a time. At first I thought they were
waiting for the bathroom. I guess this is done on very long flights, keeps the
bloodflow going or something. What seemed a little odd at about three or four
hours started to make sense to me at about five or six hours, and toward the
end of the nine hour flight I found myself envying them and their outstretched
legs and properly aligned bloodflow and entautened leg muscles, but I also knew
in order to join them I’d had to excuse myself over the lady with the rosary, probably
interrupting a silent prayer that may well have been on behalf of all of us on
that plane, and having a fundamental mistrust of air travel I managed to talk
myself out of it. Eh…a few more hours of being bent hideously at the hip isn’t
so bad.
I lost track of how many people gave us advice on dealing
with jet lag, one of modern life’s now-routine assaults on the human body, but one neither of
us ever had any experience with – stay up the night before, sleep on the plane,
don’t sleep on the plane, stay up on the arrival day, take a nap on arrival
day, take a pill, take five pills, meditate, etc etc. We both tried to sleep in
flight, but our seats were near the gargantuan Boeing 777 engines and the
muffled roar reverberating off the windows (sounded like B-flat) was just
enough to keep us from drifting off. Besides, it was only early evening our
time… The multimedia screen facing me kept ticking down the hours until arrival,
which I found both a slight comfort and a consistent annoyance. It never occurred
to me to turn the damn thing off – which I did do on the return flight. Sharon watched
a movie, but mostly I read and zoned out to Andrew Lahiff, Air Sculpture, Steve Roach and
stormloop on the iPod, and read TheTime Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England. I was most pleased to find an
outlet to keep my iPod charged – not a new development I am told and yes, we
don’t get out much.
We were warned that the line at immigration would be long – the
English, and I guess most of Europe in general, have accepted long lines (“queues”,
as the Brits would say) as a fact of life, being generally more patient than
Americans (who isn’t?), but in fact the luggage retrieval took a lot longer. We
got up to the lady’s booth after a very short line, she asked curtly why we
were in the UK, asked for a contact there (I gave them Chris’ name and address,
but it quickly occurred to me – what do you do if you don’t have anybody there
to use as a contact? Do they put you back on the plane? Assign you a foster
family? A chaperone?), stamped our passports and we went off to meet the driver
that Chris had ordered up for us.
On English soil. It has begun.
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