Going over the pond.

Sorry I didn’t give you advance warning of this trip, it was organized with little time to spare, unlike the trip last winter that was a year in the planning. But off I go it is. Solo again though will be meeting up with family here and there and hopefully friends too. This, an American Airlines flight to Chicago, has the feel of stepping back a decade or two. No individual screen therefore no map or movies. There are those tiny screens up front that you can’t really see plus of course what ever is playing is garbled by static. Why can’t they show London 2012 ? There is a lack of food. I feel like a sardine. There is a surfeit of laptops. Maybe I have been spoiled by flying Virgin America and Alaska but really American, time to upgrade these planes.
It’s more interesting outside ! We are over the Badlands of Nevada, I want to say “there is so much of nothing to see” (Barbara) but its not really like that train journey. I drove through this wasteland a couple of years back with Sister and Neice on what has come to be known as The Epic Trip. We did four thousand miles in nine days, driving from Austin Texas back to San Francisco. It was really really fun. The Great American Roadtrip. One forgets just how vast the USA is until you fly over it. Miles and miles of nothing tho’interestingly there are those circular green fields dotted about. Having seen them close up I can tell you that they are situated above an aquifer, the water comes up out of the ground and is piped into wheeled irrigation devices that circulate like the hands of a clock, hence the round fields. Interesting init! On across the Rockies to the Great Plains. Seems there’s a problem down there, no rain. The corn crop is withering away and the stilted stalks are being ploughed under. This is all very bad news for Ethanol, not to mention grocery store prices which are set to rocket in early 2013.
A pause at O’Hare Airport in Chicago then that magic moment at the end of the runway when a 747 cranks it’s engines to full power and we launch into the dusk out over Lake Michigan. Chicago’s twinkling lights below. Quite wonderful. Not so many on this flight, flight crew seem jolly, guess I will take a free gin then sleep my way to London. At seven hours this is marginally shorter than the SF flight but even so, I got a cab from the house at 10.00am and there is a long way to go yet, a long day already. Come on where’s the gin ! The map has got going and we are going due West, over Flint and Detroit and other Rust Belt Cities. Shan’t be seeing Greenland on this flight but funny to think that some seven hundred and fifty miles or so North,out of my port side window, J is rushing along on a parallel course on a Virgin flight, we land thirty minutes apart, I wave.
Thirty six thousand feet at six hundred and sixty three MPH half way between Toronto and Ottawa it’s sleep time. See you on the other side.
Landfall at Killarney (SW Ireland) and with fifty five minutes to go our pilot sure had better step on it. It’s so green down there, with all the tiny fields, quite unlike the huge pastures of the mid west before Chicago. I can see Cork. A short aside: a good friend and I went camping in this part of the Emerald Isle once, great, except we forgot the tent. Slept by the roadside one night in the fog. Woke to find we were in a garbage dump/rubbish tip. We still chuckle about that one. It’s a lovely day in Southern Ireland and all my friends in California are asleep. Good morning to those on this side though. Out over the Celtic Sea, may touch Wales. Yep, just the southwestern tip, it’s sunny, then Swansea, Cardiff and now Bristol. Engines change and we descend. If we stay on this course we shall fly right over me Mum’s house, I wonder if they will look up.
Sorry, just go to say before they make me stop, Blake, Jerusalem, those feet in ancient time, England’s green and pleasant land. Always happens when I fly in from the West. I guess I’m home, but not for long……….