Dec. 23rd, 2007

davidn: (skull)
I hate planes. It's something that I've been realizing over the last couple of years after they started becoming a regular feature and problem in my life - before that I had got over my fear of flying at 16 when we travelled by plane to Germany, and I had had no problem with occasionally flying before then. Not even when I spent ten or eleven hours on them flying to California, because at least that was a special event that didn't happen very often. Now, Whitney and I live three thousand miles away from both our families, exactly in the middle between the West coast of America and the Northeast coast of Scotland, and the only way to see either of them is to endure seven or so hours of airborne unpleasantness.

Our journey this Christmas involved going from Boston Logan to Amsterdam Schipol, and then on to Aberdeen Dyce (-With-Death Every Time You Land Here) from there. We were flying with KLM operated by Northwest Airlines, which I was only informed were known as "Northworst" well after we had to phone them up and convince them to seat us together instead of at opposite ends of the plane. Our first flight was at 7pm, and the trip was eventually to end at what would be 5am for us the next day.

To be fair to it, the longest leg over the Atlantic wasn't bad at all as far as flights go. I had loaded up my laptop with Lucasarts games beforehand, and we spent the time playing Curse of Monkey Island, or at least what I could remember of how to complete it because I'm otherwise useless at point and click adventures. And Ratatouille was on, which I hadn't seen before and completely destroys my idea that 3D animation can never have as much charm and character as traditionally drawn artwork.

After seven or so hours of that, we landed in Schipol, and it was there that I began to break down. After a seven-hour flight in a cramped seat breathing air already breathed in by everyone else and in a timeless vortex suspended between night and day (perhaps this is going a bit far), doing it again for any length of time seems like a worse idea than just swimming the English Channel and taking the train up. And it's made worse by Schipol's bizarre security. Instead of one large secure area with the gates behind it, each gate has its own individual security station that comes complete with a massive queue in front of it. After you've trudged to the scanner and had your belongings inspected like some sort of criminal, you turn the corner only to realize that you're trapped in a glass box with no escape route and more people piling in behind you. After a while, a pair of gates at the other end open, and much like a livestock market, the passengers are herded into a tunnel and down to the plane.

And I sat down, closed my eyes for a moment and suddenly realized that we were in the air. I've never slept through a takeoff before, and I thought that it would be a fairly difficult thing to do, but the exhaustion of the day made me achieve something that I never thought possible. But the disadvantage of letting yourself fall asleep is the awful feeling you get when your sleep is cut short, and I felt mildly to critically ill throughout descent (a feeling that wasn't helped by the captain announcing that the runway was a bit shorter than they'd expected so they'd have to slam on the brakes). After landing in wind and rain and going through customs, the journey was finally at an end.

At least, it would have been if KLM hadn't lost both of our bags. We waited at the luggage carousel for a while, with Whitney getting increasingly worried about the lack of bright red holdalls and suitcases coming round. I said not to worry because of the large group of people still waiting, and it was at that moment that the luggage people turned off the lights and went home. It wasn't just our bags that they'd lost - they'd failed to forward the luggage belonging to everyone with a connecting flight.

Now we're sitting at home watching the Top Gear presenters night, and I'm wearing the pair of jogging trousers that I've had on for thirty-six hours along with a dressing gown and "Thing 2" T-shirt scavenged from the bottom of a drawer. Whitney's been out to Tesco already and has returned with some rather decent inexpensive clothing (something that America has in very short supply, by the way). Also among the missing items are a few Christmas presents that we have to wrap, and rather importantly, my levothyroxine pills. The only effect of missing them for a couple of days will be to make me a little more tired and irritable, but at this point I doubt you'd be able to tell.

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