Departé

Not much to say except that once again (see my South Pole Blog regarding return travel from NZ) the damn stewardesses refused my fair share of whiskey on the plane! Ok, so 5 in a row might be a little much, but I can’t sleep on planes so what else am I supposed to do all night? Maybe I should back it up just a bit …

As I was saying, not much to say. I left Midway airport in Chicago on Thursday (Feb. 1) evening. The airport was packed with hopeful Bears fans waiting to board their planes for Miami, Super Bowl Tickets in hand, covered head to toe in orange and blue, belching, scratching, harassing and giggling. One “biker” couple tried to get their paws (yuk yuk yuk) on some big Budweiser “Congratulations Bears” banner in the airport bar I was pre-boarding-drinking at. The bar tender kindly informed them they were out of luck, as were the previous 300 people that had asked him for it that day.

Then a quick stopover in Detroit, very quick, I had to run. Detroit Airport is amazing. I hear Detroit not so much.

The big haul wasn’t all that bad. The plane, a Northwest flight, was pretty new and the movie selection was amazing, I mean it. Notwithstanding, I chose the worst of the lot. Let me save you 2-3 hours of your life, “The Prestige” is anything but. Well, who knows, maybe it was excellent and I was just too drunk and sleep deprived to appreciate it (unlikely). Of course I didn’t resort to film until I had completed my reading, the pulp sci-fi classic Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, the sequel to Ender’s Game. I hear the guy is a total kook these days, but man those books are great.

Which incidentally was how I made my first French friend and likely my last French friend. I mean, we hit it off but I don’t think the French are really looking for any more friends right now. At least it seems that way in the streets man. Anyway, who knows what his name was, some garbled French that started with a silent ‘g’ and ended with a silent vowel or something. He really liked the Ender series and then we got to talking about Nabokov, Cosmology and “Children of Men”. We had a good chat.

So I didn’t sleep, didn’t get drunk enough and didn’t see a good movie but I did manage to finish a book and make a friend. Not the worst flight experience ever.