How I spent my Christmas Vacation

Home again, home again

My brother and I were up and ready to go before the rest of the family, so we took orders and made our final trip to La Baguette. I had a scrambled egg and cheddar baguette. Mark started feeling sick while we waited for our food to come up and headed back to the room. I guess it was just his turn to be diseased. Lynn's flight to Paris (where she'd be spending New Years with a bunch of her college friends) was supposed to take off about an hour before our flight to London, so we were at the airport more than three hours before our takeoff. They wouldn't even let us check in until two hours before our posted flight time. I made a point of spending the rest of my pounds on hot chocolate and Crunchie bars (oh, Cadbury, why don't you do more in the US?) Lynn's flight took off late due to bad weather in Paris (quote from her friend Rebecca: "It's snowing like bird flu here!") so she left just a little before we did. She only took one large carry on and her purse while we took the rest of her shit with us. I popped a Dramamine and barely remember anything about that first flight. We landed in London and had to change planes. Heathrow is fucking huge and we had to take a shuttle to get from one terminal to another. We weren't sure if we should be checking in through British Airways or American Airlines at this point, so I tried my credit card in the eticket machine, but it didn't work and we went to the American Airlines area. I immediately spotted the sign that said our flight was already boarding and that we should allow for 20 minutes to walk to our gate, but my parents either didn't hear me or didn't believe we were boarding so early, so they went shopping at the Heathrow to spend the rest of their pounds. A whole lot of tea and biscuits later, my brother and I were getting nervous about the boarding time and started urging my parents to hurry up. When it finally clicked in their heads, we ended up half-running across much of the terminal to check into our gate, where we discovered they "board" passengers into the gate area before the plane even arrives. Oh well. It was still only a few minutes before they began "preboarding" the platinum passengers, which apparently my dad is thanks to all his business travel. We found our seats and my brother and I started in on the MENSA quiz in the airline magazine.
Flying to London is a lot faster than flying from London, thanks to headwinds or something like that. Long fucking flight. Over 8 hours. I watched part of Wallace and Grommit's Curse of the Ware Rabbit, slept, and spilled cranberry juice all over myself and my brother and in my purse. I took everything out of my purse and tried to dab up as much of the wet and sticky as possible, but I'd just given all my shout wipes to Lynn in the Edinburgh airport. Figures. On the flight in, due to the compressed time with moving through time zones and such, it felt like they were feeding us constantly. On the way back, I was significantly hungry and into the Crunchie bars long before they bothered serving us food. Shitty airline food. Some non-descript chicken in beige sauce with green beans. Mark needed a lot of entertaining (youngest child thing, I think) so for the last few hours I switched seats with my dad and sat by my mom instead. We were all zombies by the time we got our luggage, went through customs, and out to the pay phones at O'Hare to call the cab. I had the easiest load (my backpack is quite manageable and I only had one of Lynn's small bags besides my purse) so I bee-lined it to the pay phone and did the cab calling. I then decided to try calling the kennel where Freud was to see how late they were open, just in case I could make it there and get him that night. I'd put the kennel's business card in my wallet. My wallet wasn't in my purse. Fuck. The cop stationed outside customs and the American Airlines connections desk let me go back in to try to ask someone to call to see if I'd left it on the plane. My passport had been separate, and the last time I was absolutely positive I'd had it was at Hethrow when I tried to check in to our flight with my credit card. What made the most sense to me was that I'd taken it out when I spilled juice in my purse and hadn't put it back in, and since I traded seats with my dad I didn't get to do my normal OCD check of everything to make sure I didn't leave anything on the plane. I had to wait in the line with all the people trying to change planes and check into domestic flights and shit before a ticket agent would help me, but she was very nice and called the gates until she found my plane and told them our row and seat numbers and described my wallet (large and leopard print...) and then I had to wait. Meanwhile, my dad and Mark took all the luggage in the cab I'd called back to Oak Park while my mom waited for me. The gate people told the ticket agent they didn't find anything, so I was told to file a police report. Fuck. A very strange but friendly cop came down and I again had to describe my wallet and its contents. It had all of my Hanukkah gift cards in it, not that much cash, my license, my credit cards, my bank card, my Uno Wild Card, my car insurance card, my expired International Student ID, and my health insurance card. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. I just wanted to crawl into bed the moment I got home, but I had to cancel all my bank and credit cards and leave a message with the AA lost and found. My mom and I wanted Crunchie bars, which had been put in Lynn's computer bag. Where was Lynn's computer bag? We couldn't find it in the house anywhere. My parents called the cab company, who called the cab driver, who also did not have it. At midnight, my parents drove back to the airport where they found Lynn's computer bag (containing Lynn's computer as well as the Crunchie bars) sitting quietly by the pay phones. So much for airport security, but lucky for us. That computer had all the photos on it from our trip, as well as Lynn's entire semester abroad. She would have killed someone. I was asleep before my parents got home.

posted by Jill @ Friday, December 30, 2005