The Departure and Arrival (x 3)

Apparently I needed to pay back some of this good karma I’ve been getting lately.

Last Friday afternoon I showed up at the airport earlier than needed, not realizing that I only needed 1 hour pre-check-in for my first flight to JFK.  My flight boards on-time, everything is off to a good start.  I watch lots of people board, and this flight seems to have more kids on it than any other flight I have ever been on in my life.  Uh oh.  Well a 2.5 hour flight to New York turns out to be 4.25 hours of screaming kids instead, as we entered holding patterns and sat on the runway for-ev-er.  Oops, and now lookie there, my connecting flight to London has just departed.  I get rebooked to London (with another connecting to Lyon ), and am on the only other flight to Lyon that day, which is 7 hours later than my original.  (Did I mention my boss-to-be is picking me up at the airport at Lyon , and I have no way to get in touch with her to alert the change in plans???)

London flight (British Airways) delayed only 1.25 hours, we board and get pushed back from the gate.  We got pushed a whole 10 feet or so.  Then a few more feet.  After nearly 2 hours on the runway we shot up in the sky – yeah!  We landed in London , late obviously, so we had no gate to park our beast of an airplane.  By the way, this was the *biggest* airplane I have ever seen; it was a double-decker!!!!!  The wings were sooo long, two engines hanging off each wing, and way more tires/wheels than most semi-trailors.  After we landed I went upstairs on the double-decker beast; I had to know what they had going on.  The British and their double-decker buses and planes, I swear.  Turns out I wish I was up there… first-class beds!  (SEE attached couple of pix.)

While sitting on JFK runway for what seemed like forever, I on-demanded “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”  Now that is a great movie; I can’t believe it has taken me so many years to finally see it.  For the first 2/3 of the movie, I struggled to figure out whether Butch or the Kid was Paul Newman or Robert Redford.  I changed my mind over and over, then finally put my mind where I know best – food!  I started picturing all those bottles and jars of salad dressing and organic salsa that I have purchased--- Newman’s Own!  Paul Newman has a sketch of himself on his product; his vanity helped me in my movie knowledge!  I liked Butch – Paul played him well. :)  And Sundance wasn’t so bad either… ;)

Well friends, 28 hours of delayed and rebooked flights later, and I am finally looking at a bed.  That’s all she wrote—