arriving at the airport

So, as soon as I sent the last email, we got up to go make our “meeting” with US customs at 11:45am that was “just upstairs” according to the woman who checked our bag.  But, upstairs was security with long lines and we weren’t going to make our “meeting” so, suddenly everything got hectic.  Wait in line, strip of all of your possessions, but keep your passport, no put it through the machine, any liquids, where’s your boarding pass, US Customs is downstairs, follow the big flag signs.  We tear through security and start going through this maze of an airport following these signs with little American flags.  We finally get downstairs to customs and give them our little papers, where they pull up a picture of our bag that we already checked to make sure that it was ours.  We don’t have to go through customs anymore in Chicago, but we finally looked at our tickets and they say that the gates close at 11:45am.  So, now we’re hurrying through another security checkpoint, this one more American, so the shoes have to come off on top of everything else.  Again with the keep the passport, relinquish the boarding pass, show me this, go through that, any liquids?  So, now it is 12:15pm and we finally get to our gate.  They have started to board, but are only on business class so far, so we check out the one little deli that has sandwiches in case they don’t feed us on this flight.  No go, but there was some duty free whiskey that was fairly cheap and we don’t have any connecting flights, so John got that to come with us.  So, after thinking that we had all this time to spare, sitting and eating, reading and talking, we suddenly had to act like we had arrived late for our flight.  We were able to board and everyone was on the plane by 12:45pm which doesn’t help when you don’t leave the ground until 1:35.  This flight is already a long one, why make it longer by making us board so early?  We also have a lot of free spaces on this flight, so some of you could have come with us on this trip.  This was already a cheap flight back, so I can’t imagine why it’s not full. 

We’re safely on the plane and checking out the movies that we can watch on the way back and DAMN IT!!! Lincoln is one of them.  Now, this is a good movie and Daniel Day Lewis deserved the Oscar, but John has become obsessed with this movie.  They were playing it on the ship and he spent almost an entire day catching it at different points and watching it the rest of the way through.  We set up to watch another movie that was highly entertaining, but the person in the seat in front of me was watching Lincoln and he would keep me updated at what point they were at in the movie.  We watched the Sessions which has Helen Hunt in it and she is a sex therapist for a paralyzed man, great flick and it starred almost everyone that was great in Deadwood.  Well, except for my favorite two characters in Deadwood, but they have other careers and I haven’t seen these people since the show.   

Now I’m rambling, but if you have never taken the flight back over the ocean, you can’t conceive of how long it takes.  You might think that you will be able to rest, or you will be able to whatever, and it never happens.  Whenever I take this flight again, I think about the fact that I would never make it to Asia.  I think that I will have to take a ship to get over there and back because if 8 hours is too long on a plane, I can’t imagine the 16 to 20 hour flights.  I don’t think that people were meant to fly for periods of time that long, I mean look at this email to you guys have degenerated into mindlessness and we still have over 5 hours to go…