Geneva to LA…

I have never been on a flight before where so many people just got up and did whatever they wanted… even if the plane was taxing to the runway for takeoff or bumping its way through turbulence.

Or maybe it just seemed that way because I was so tired.

The taxi came to pick us up at 4:45 this morning. When we booked this flight, 9:15 didn’t seem too early. It was a couple of hours later than a lot of the flights we’d been looking at. Still, 4:45 is early. Really… really early. At least we had a taxi and didn’t have to drive. That was a last minute change, and I think, it was a good one. We got to the airport more than 2 hours before our flight. There were no lines anywhere, so we had plenty of time to just mill around. Checked the duty free shop for a last minute gift, but didn’t find anything. The selection of English magazines was very disappointing. I bought an old People, because trashy magazines make easy airplane reading. I also bought some British magazine… because I felt guilty spending so much for magazines when I was heading to a place with no shortage of reading material I can understand. But that was a waste, because all the celebrities they mentioned were people I’d never heard of.

On the plane, it was something close to a free-for-all. Ok, not quite that bad. But after they finally got everyone to sit down so we could push back from the gate, some dude kept getting up to rifle through his bag in the overhead bin. And the ride was quite bumpy for quite a long time. But no one paid any attention to the fasten your seatbelt sign and people just wandered all over. I can understand needing to go to the bathroom or sneaking a little stretch right at your seat. But some people were just standing in the aisles near the galley just to stand there. The flight attendants finally gave up on telling people to sit down; I guess they thought if they fell and got hurt, they’d be getting what they had coming.

One reason I’d pushed to fly on Continental is that they have individual video screens in each headrest, and a variety of channels from which to choose. But, just like at home, there were all those channels with nothing to watch. Bill found enough to watch to stay awake for the entire 9 hour trip. Kaitlyn watched some movie about an owl then some Looney Tunes. She still managed to work in a good nap. I dozed off and on, in between playing some of the video games the plane had.

The Newark airport handles international customers in a weird way. After you go through customs, you end up on the wrong side of security and you have to wait in that line again. Maybe they do it on purpose, to make sure that you’ve passed through an American metal detector. But watching the guy in front of us (who’d been pushy and rude, by the way) I was glad I hadn’t made any duty free purchases. She wasn’t going to let him take his giant bottle of whiskey, because it was a big bottle of liquid. Even though it was still sealed from the shop in Geneva. Last I saw them, they were wandering off to the nearby duty free shop, I guess to have it re-sealed. How stupid. The guy behind us got upset because the security woman told him he couldn’t take his candle on the plane. I guess he was hoping for a romantic trip.

All in all, it was a long, tiring trip. We left our house at 4:45am and got to the airport in LA at 3am Grenoble time. Then it was two more hours to our hotel, thanks to traffic. It was a long… long…. long day.

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