My Trip: Part One (Over the Pond)
As many of you are aware, or at least some of you are aware, I took a trip to England over spring break. This is a cross between an academic trip and a trip to visit my girlfriend, who happens to be a native (a term I find rather humorous). I said I would talk a bit about my trip, and so I shall, because that’s what bloggers do I suppose (well, maybe only some bloggers).There are going to be quite a few gaps in the pictures, since I didn’t catch everything. There’s a logical reason for this: I was a little preoccupied with my lovely girlfriend. You’ll simply have to forgive me for those gaps.The trip started from SFO (San Francisco International Airport). If you can’t tell, that’s in San Francisco, in California. Yeah. Hopefully that’s blatantly obvious (here I’m sticking my tongue out of course). Now, one thing I have to say about airline travel is that there has never been a single case where I showed up early and barely made it to my flight. Nor has there been a case when I showed up semi-early (within that 1.5 to 2 hour time frame) and barely made it. In fact, I have to either be one of the luckiest individuals when it comes to airline travel or all that hubbub about long lines, delays, etc. is all a load of cods wallop. I’m leaning towards the former, since that makes me feel special.So I showed up at SFO an hour and forty-five minutes early, stood in the extremely short little US Airways line to have my bag checked and make sure I knew that the bag was going to follow me to my final destination and proceeded to security. Security has changed in America, but it didn’t surprise me because I had flown to Oregon last year and had seen the changes. I knew to take off my shoes, take my laptop out of the bag, take all the metal off, etc. Well, one thing I forgot was to take my wallet out, thinking that there couldn’t possibly be any metal in there. Except…there was something metal in there and I have no freaking clue what it is.So, after the machine beeped once, twice, and a third time, the security people corralled me into a clear glass box with a locked door at the end, in much the same way that cattle on corralled to the slaughtering run. The feeling at that moment was a pinch of surprise–because, after all, I had done nothing wrong–and nervous anticipation at what evil act was to follow. Okay, so anticipation is the wrong word. I think fear would be more appropriate, since the thought of having my innards examined via some large man with a surgical glove had crossed my mind.I waited for a few minutes before a man came, unlocked the door, and led me to a little waiting area. There I emptied my pockets and found myself violated, to a certain degree, by a man with surgical cloves. There’s nothing comfortable about a grown man feeling searching every inch of you but your most delicate bits with prying fingers. It was…interesting. Then I had to go through the humiliating experience of presenting my legs and arms in different manners so he could scan them with his magical plastic gizmo that randomly beeps when exposed to belly buttons, or at least to his belly button. I’m sure he was relieved to find that my rear didn’t beep, as was I. So he checked my wallet and lo and behold, it beeped. What the hell is metal in my wallet? I don’t know. He doesn’t know. And neither do the people at the x-ray machine that looked at it. It just beeped.So, having finally secured my belongings and told I could continue on my way, I headed into SFO to look for my departure gate and waited. Then I waited some more. And some more. I managed to get through security, even after being frisked and delayed, in about forty minutes, so I had about an hour to waste. The result was this picture:That’s SFO airport. Or a part of it at least. Then there was this picture of me being tired and utterly bored:Alright, so I got on my flight and spend the next five hours or so flying through the air over brown landscape in a slightly comfortable chair until I landed here:That is Charlotte, North Carolina. Well, that’s the airport at least. It looks exciting doesn’t it? There’s a little luggage car zooming by in the background, and some yellow car thing next to a plane nearby. Oh so exciting, eh?Yeah, not. So, I had to get off my plane that landed in Charlotte to get on another plane that flew up to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No, it’s not exciting. It’s sort of irritating really, but it came with the cheap ticket, so I dealt with it. At least I got fed. Once my plane from Charlotte took off, albeit LATE, we headed off to Philadelphia. Apparently Philly’s international airport gets a lot of traffic because when we got there we spent about thirty minutes going in circles, which confused a vast majority of the passengers who probably thought the plane was either possessed or crashing in a spiral very slowly. I think the plane was possessed, but the logical explanation is that Philly is just busy.So we landed and I had the exciting opportunity to spend about twenty minutes walking from my arrival gate all the way to my departure gate, which was conveniently on the complete opposite side of the airport. Philly’s international airport isn’t small by the way. It’s actually rather big and my feet and butt hurt after walking so much. Then when I got to my gate I found out I had to have my passport inspected to make sure I could legally get on the plane. I went over the the
Book Review Up: Rolling Thunder by John Varley
Just thought you all should know that my review of John Varley’s Rolling Thunder can be found here! Hope you like it and give the book your consideration. It was a fun read and would recommend it! (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)