I am a bit of a passenger aircraft nerd. Not supremely, not so that I can recognize them flying in the sky above me, but just enough that when I walked onto my plane in Gone West and saw the seat configuration, I thought, "I wonder when I was last on a 767. Was that the KLM flight on the way back from Nairobi in 2007, or did I fly Kenya Airways and they had switched that route to a 777? They don't fly them very much within the US."
(If I recall correctly, the nighttime flight from NBO to AMS is KLM, and that was a 767, but of course thinking about it I googled "Kenya Airways 777" and started watching videos of landings in Amsterdam and Nairobi and then Kigali, and then a video of some guy walking to work in Kigali. Because there is just too much internet out there.)
I felt strangely overwhelmed at O'Hare airport.
I mean, it's just an airport. I have been in many, many airports in my life. I don't think I could remember them all to count them.
But for some reason, at 5 am (Chicago time; 3 am in Gone West), the hordes of frantic people made me jumpy. There were just so many of them.
You know you need to get away from your small, deadened-downtown city when a bustling airport makes you nervous, particularly since I like bustling. I miss bustling. So maybe it was just the early hour, or the brightness and noise on two upright, middle-seat hours of sleep.
There were dozens of sailors in the airport, and one of them was standing on the moving walkway with his girlfriend, hugging quietly, until his friends walked up beside them and catcalled.
I slept for an hour across the seats of a plane sitting at the gate, until that flight was canceled and I found a couple of empty seats across from my new gate, where I slept for another hour. I woke up once to notice that an elderly woman had sat down right by my head, but I was too sleepy to care.
I was the only person happy about the canceled flight. The other people on my flight were talking about renting cars to get from the Big D to Mitten Capital of the World, but I wanted to go the Big D, and flying straight there saved me from the need to pay a taxi or persuade a hotel shuttle to get me to downtown Mitten Capital of the World, and from a two-hour bus ride to the Big D airport.
I just walked straight out into the C-S family car, where I held hands with the baby until we got to the pupuseria.
(If I recall correctly, the nighttime flight from NBO to AMS is KLM, and that was a 767, but of course thinking about it I googled "Kenya Airways 777" and started watching videos of landings in Amsterdam and Nairobi and then Kigali, and then a video of some guy walking to work in Kigali. Because there is just too much internet out there.)
I felt strangely overwhelmed at O'Hare airport.
I mean, it's just an airport. I have been in many, many airports in my life. I don't think I could remember them all to count them.
But for some reason, at 5 am (Chicago time; 3 am in Gone West), the hordes of frantic people made me jumpy. There were just so many of them.
You know you need to get away from your small, deadened-downtown city when a bustling airport makes you nervous, particularly since I like bustling. I miss bustling. So maybe it was just the early hour, or the brightness and noise on two upright, middle-seat hours of sleep.
There were dozens of sailors in the airport, and one of them was standing on the moving walkway with his girlfriend, hugging quietly, until his friends walked up beside them and catcalled.
I slept for an hour across the seats of a plane sitting at the gate, until that flight was canceled and I found a couple of empty seats across from my new gate, where I slept for another hour. I woke up once to notice that an elderly woman had sat down right by my head, but I was too sleepy to care.
I was the only person happy about the canceled flight. The other people on my flight were talking about renting cars to get from the Big D to Mitten Capital of the World, but I wanted to go the Big D, and flying straight there saved me from the need to pay a taxi or persuade a hotel shuttle to get me to downtown Mitten Capital of the World, and from a two-hour bus ride to the Big D airport.
I just walked straight out into the C-S family car, where I held hands with the baby until we got to the pupuseria.
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