Behind the Iron Curtain – June 21st
Our final day on the travel really was kind of a non-day.. a non-day that lasted for about 32 hours when you take time zone changes into account. It started early with a trip to the airport in Vienna – which had the potential to be painful due to Bush’s visit. Fortunately, he wasn’t due to leave until later that day.
The flight to Amsterdam was much rougher than expected – it was the first time in almost two weeks that we saw clouds and bad weather. By the time we landed in Amsterdam, it was a pretty constant rain that felt great as we walked across the tarmac to the shuttle bus.
We had to do a pretty quick transfer since our plane got out of Vienna a little late. We reboarded an A330 and settled in for the long trans-Atlantic flight. We settled in, got our beverages when airborne, and fired up the movie “Tsotse” on the viewer.
I’ve had really bad luck with in-flight beverages lately. I think I’ve dumped half a dozen of them over the past year. I usually miss everything, but I’ve had ‘em hit me before. My previous best was having a beer run down the handrail into the woman’s purse in the seat behind me when I was in First Class. This flight was right on track with these – my headphone cord caught and flipped my fresh glass of diet Pepsi right into my lap and between my legs to make an icy puddle under my butt. Great – 6 hours of flying with a wet butt. Heather gamely said “Why don’t you go to the bathroom and get some towels?” Looking at my soaked lap, I decided I’d just wait it out. Mercifully, the dry airplane air had me dried out by the time we were over Newfoundland.
Our entire flight was punctuated with some little 4-year-old Banshee shrieking at the top of his lungs for eight hours. Yes, eight hours. Is it possible to check them as luggage? Even the flight attendents were upset about that one after the flight!
Well, that wraps up my story. I’m sort of amazed that it took me two whole months to complete this travelogue.. when I set off on documenting this, I don’t think I intended each episode to be quite as long as they turned out. Ultimately though, I really wanted to capture what we did and to really give a feel for what it was like. This project was as much an exercise to capture the trip for my own memory as it is to share it with others.
Check out all of the pictures at:
Behind the Iron Curtain 2006