It has taken a full 24 hours to recover enough to close this travel chapter. We awoke at 6:30 am in Edinburgh yesterday ( that’s 12:30 AM in KC, and 1:30 AM on the east coast) after a terrible night’s sleep. (The Irn Bru I drank to help get rid of the hangover apparently kept me up most of the night.) But no problem – we have an 8 hour flight to Newark that we can sleep through, right?
So we wandered to the terminal to check in. Frank can’t do online checkin for international flights because they need to see his green card. That was where they told me that I couldn’t take my knitting in my carry on because the needles were too pointy. WTF? That’s a new one on me. The new baby arriving two doors down will just have to wait for his jumper then. Harumph.
Nothing else got the thumbs down and our cases just squeaked by under the 22kg limit. (Note: we packed light on the way over with on small carry on each. We just made it and had one much larger carry on and a personal item on the way back. I don’t want to look at the Master Card bill next month!) We grabbed some breakfast and boarded the plane in a relatively timely fashion. I was very happy that we had paid the extra fare for the bulk head seat so we had LOTS of leg room. And then the 8 hours of boredom began.
Let’s start with the fact that I’m an idiot and forgot to order my gluten free meal. So no food on the plane for me. I remembered this in the airport and picked up a salad and an apple but it was still a very long flight otherwise. I read the book Frank brought to read (Burning Down George Orwell’s House – Goodreads review forthcoming) and finished a book on my kindle (The Secret Rooms – not nearly as good as the other one). Then I figured out where my little movie monitor was stored and watched Inside Out (so cute – I cried on the plane) and got most of the way through Far from the Madding Crowd – still need to catch the last 15 minutes or so.
And then we were in Newark. For 3.5 hours. Customs and immigration were a breeze. I declared our excess of alcohol (2 liters of liquor and 1.5 liters of wine) and no one blinked. We rechecked the bags, slogged our incredibly heavy carry on’s (mine had all the shoes and hiking boots!) to another terminal and bought overpriced drinks at the only bar in the place. Until we got bored with that so we found the only TV there that was broadcasting the Packers-Bears game and started a Packer party in the terminal. The flight was delayed by 30 minutes and for the first time I didn’t mind because I got to see the end of the game. (Packers won of course.)
Then the final leg – the puddle jumper to KCI. I had run out of entertainment and my consciousness was starting to fade. And of course, sleep wouldn’t come. We landed without incident, claimed the bags, called the Uber car (love that app!) and finally made it back to the house at 7:30 pm – 19 hours after we had gotten up that morning. Frank managed to drive on the right side of the road most of the way to the store to get milk and Cheerios. Then the gourmet dinner of frozen pizza and GF beer before calling it a day at 8:30.
So now the trip has ended and so must these entries until the next trip. If you are interested in less frequent updates on our more mundane adventures in KC, feel free to head over to cannonchronicles.com . You’ll get interesting stories and updates but you wont get
Numbers for today:
- Number of miles flown: 4351
- Number of hours awake: 20
- Number of hours bored to tears: 3
- Number of steps around airport terminals: 5432
- Number of days until the next adventure: 165
The Cannon Family's travel blog 