Europe Trip: July 7 & 8

7-7-09 ~ Tuesday

Three weeks in Europe!

Katie and I left at the 6:00 in the evening. The drive to Salt Lake City was only five hours and rather pleasant; Katie’s mother, Meredith, drove the whole way, leaving Katie and me to our silliness in the back seat. During a particularly silly moment of silliness I hugged the seat in front of me, and almost immediately a red light on the dashboard began blinking and a little alarm bell started ringing. It quit when I sat back. I was rejected by a car seat! It did not like the hug.

It didn’t take us long to check into the airport hotel; the Palm Restaurant is right next to the hotel and there was a giant, live palm tree in the pool area of the hotel. It grew up three floors so you could see it even from the hallway we walked to get to our room. A ficus tree also grew nearby; also enormous and it had a toy monkey among the branches. Our room was nice; not very big with two beds in it; the sheets were a tasteful multi-colored paisley on an off-white background, and the furniture accents were all light oak or light marble. Tasteful multi-color paisley or not, they were still quite comfortable for the night’s sleep.



7-8-09 ~ Wednesday

We were up at 8:50, and our hotel room came with a free breakfast (limited options) so we took advantage of that. Mrs. Huebschmann left around 10:00 and Katie and I took the airport shuttle at 10:30. Not much terribly interesting at the first part of the airport; the guy who checked our passports at security teased us about our passport photos, but I mostly suspect that was because he was in dire want of something better to do. We took off our shoes and bared the contents of our backpacks for security and passed through just fine. Our flight didn’t leave until 12:45, so we wandered through the airport’s few shops. One of them had those “travel-friendly” crinkle-clothes, including shirts, skirts, and bags. The bags were actually a pretty nifty idea -- packs tiny but expands to a hefty size. Their downside was that they looked rather like a size-‘elephant’ speedo when they weren’t stretched out. Illustrative photos may follow.

The flight was perfectly on time. I hadn’t gotten to be on many planes before now, so the whole take-off experience is still so cool for me! Just the sheer speed the plane goes down the runway; you think for sure you’ll be pressed into your seat for takeoff, but without ever feeling a thing you suddenly see the ground just slope away. The only indicator that we had left the ground was the muted whir of the landing gear retracting. It was really fun to watch the city grow smaller and smaller until the buildings were just grey squares amongst the green and tan landscape and the highways and roads were little more than winding threads. I had no idea it was so marshy and green around the Salt Lake. You’d never know it just from the looks of Salt Lake City when you drive through it.

The two children in the seat across from us and one row back set straight away to expressing themselves as vocally and physically as possible. They must have been around five and eight, old enough to know better. The mother spent the first hour and a half delivering empty ultimatums. At one point the little boy threw his cheetos on the ground and stomped them into the carpet, and the mother did nothing to stop him. It took a little more than an hour and a half of shrieking, squalling, and general babbling for the mother to finally take them to the back of the plane (hopefully for a good wallop, though I highly doubt it…) and the lady in the seat directly in front of them immediately moved to a new seat.
“I just can’t take it any more,” she said as she gathered her stuff. I gave her an air-five. The children were not much better when the mother brought them back. She would hiss some threat at them and the two kids would laugh and laugh. By then the flight was pretty much over, and at the very end the mother let down all pretenses of trying to look good in public and just started yelling at her kids as the rest of the people left the plane.

We arrived at the Chicago airport at 3:45, twenty-five minutes early according to our pilot. The Chicago O’Hare airport is big! While the skies outside were grey and drizzling the inside of the terminal was buzzing with travelers. Katie and I walked all around the airport, venturing into a few interesting shops before searching for something decent and affordable (pick one…) for dinner. Of course everything was overpriced, especially because it was in an airport.
Gate K7 originally said our flight would depart at 6:15, but when we got there it had been pushed to 6:45. We hung out around the gate until 6:30, when the gate attendant let us board the Boeing 747-300 (I remembered that specifically for you). This plane was freaking huge. It had forty-two rows of seats, and in the lower-class area each row had seven seats across (three in the center and two on either side). The plane taxied to the beginning of the runway and sat there for a long time. Then the pilot jammed the throttle forward and we rocketed down the runway, lurching into the air and slicing through the low-lying clouds. I never cease to be amazed by how much we take for granted -- this enormous metal craft, jamb-packed with passengers, still manages to become airborne and carry us all so far away.
A very nice African lady had her two- or three-year-old son sitting in the row behind Katie. Her son was still very young, so it was easier to understand his constant crying. The lady did all she could to help him, checking all his necessities, rocking him and singing softly. The lady next to me was disgusted that the flight crew didn’t offer her a first-class seat to help her out, since she was sitting between two strangers and still trying to calm her child. The lady next to me was named Deb, and though she has cousins in Galway and her grandparents own five pubs there, this was her first time going to Dublin. I inquired about the crop circles book she was reading.
“I’m a very new age person, yeah, and I’m huge into meditating,” she began her explanation. She studies the earth’s energy lines and has been keeping an eye on all the crop circles Europe gets per week (CropCircleConnector.com or something like that?). She said this year has been a banner year for crop circles with an increased number of animal shapes and an impressive one based on the binary system. She mentioned there had been quite a few recent crop circles around the area in London where we’d be staying. She has a friend who had a crop circle appear right next to his house and he meditated inside it. He said “it was a totally trippy experience to meditate inside of a crop circle,” so she was going to try for herself. That’s why she was on this flight.

The lights dimmed at 9:30 and a tv screen showed where our flight was on it’s path. We were over Nova Scotia! Such a bummer it was too dark outside to see the scenery. Katie and I had been forewarned to get some kind of sleep during the flight since we’d be crossing into a totally different time zone, so we pulled out our provided pillows and tried…