24+ hours of non-stop in-flight fun.
Today's itinerary:
We fly from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, via Chicago and Frankfurt. Once there, we sleep, pausing only long enough to get dinner. Then we sleep some more.
I got up at 6 this morning (PST) after having gone to bed at 2am. I should say 6 Sunday morning. Darin and Mitch--who flew down last night and spent most of the evening playing Zelda 64--got dressed really quickly and we were all ready to go by the time Mary and Rod arrived to take us to the airport. They had Yogi the Welsh corgi with them; he sat on Mary's lap.
LAX wasn't too bad when we got there (though way more traffic than normal) and our end of the United terminal was pretty empty when we got some seats. I went to the Starbucks to get breakfast and found a Cinnabon, so I got 2 buns, a mocha latta, and a coffee. The 3 of us shared the buns, which worked out perfectly. I described finding the Cinnabon as: "Go to the Evil Overlords and continue past to the Agents of Satan."
We discovered what a nightmare the United terminal is right now:
- Because of the crescent shape of the end of the terminal, a lot more planes can radiate out than can from a straight-edge terminal.
- Because of the construction, there are nowhere near enough lounge seats.
- The overhead sound system is useless. Not only did speaker after speaker cut in on other speakers' announcements, but many of those announcements were unintelligible.
- When we could hear announcements, they would be to the effect of, "Rows 25-30 may board." No flight information, just the rows.
- There were flights boarding at every gate.
- Multiple flights boarded at our gate.
- We pushed through the throngs, thinking it was time to board. When we discovered it wasn't, it was okay because the bottleneck in the gate hallway concealed available seats. (People were sitting everywhere in the terminal--it was chaos.)
- When the attendant did start calling seat rows for our flight, she did so without amplification. If you weren't within earshot of her speaking voice, you didn't hear her.
- They started boarding the Great Unwashed (coach)...but right before we walked on, she decided to board all of first class (who were hanging out as a group nearby) at once. Why? We have no idea.
And to top it all off: the flight left an hour late. The pilot assured us after takeoff that everything was fine: no one had a connection before 5 CST, and we'd be in well ahead of that. We stopped a flight attendant and said we had a connection at 4:40pm. She gave us some nonsense about what the pilot had said, and we couldn't get it through to her that we weren't asking her, we were telling her.
The meal: chicken with carrots, salad, butterscotch cookie.
The movie: The Parent Trap
We got to Chicago and had to get from the C terminal to the B terminal in the United wing (thankfully, we didn't have to go to the International Terminal). It was a pretty long route--through the corridor with the overhead neon lights and the bad rendition of Rhapsody in Blue (or, to a generation of Americans, the theme to United Airlines commercials)--and of course our gate was at the end of the terminal. We were amongst the last ones on board, so there was no overhead space left for our bags.
So for the 9 hours from Chicago to Frankfurt, I had my coat around me, I had Darin's coat at my feet, and my backpack was at Darin's feet. He complained about having no leg room. Not only did I not have leg room, but Darin rested on the armrest between us to avoid leaning into the aisle, and the woman by the window took the armrest between us because she had a bandage/cast on her forearm. I kept my arms pinned at my sides practically the whole flight.
I kept busy by reading The Sunne In Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman, a novel of the life of Richard III. Great stuff--1000 pages and I went straight through. (I dozed for about an hour the whole flight and that's it.) I kept trying to map the novel to the movie version I'd see of Shakespeare's Richard III, and I realized I was mixing up Ian McKellan's Richard III with Al Pacino's Looking for Richard. (A neat trick.) Penman did a great job of showing who was doing what to whom and absolving Richard III of any of the blacker deeds ascribed to him. But I have read a book that came to the conclusion that he must have done them. I prefer SKP's version.
The meals: shrimp with pasta, pear; omelet, yogurt, fruit.
The movie: The Avengers
We got to Frankfurt and walked an incredibly long way (after getting off the plane by stairs and taking a bus to the terminal) to the gate for the connection to Tel Aviv. After we turned yet another corner and were faced with yet another corridor, I said, "Who designed this place? The same guy who did Atlanta?"
We sat around and chatted at the gate. Wasn't good for more than that.
I got pretty darn cranky on the flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv, because I hadn't slept. I also read a bad book, Covenant of the Vampire, by Jeanne Kalogridis which among so many other errors commits the cardinal sin of not ending--it simply stops for the sake of the sequel. That kind of behavior shouldn't be encouraged. Do not buy this book or any other by this author.
The meal: shrimp with pasta (again), chocolate Santa--Darin called it the perfect meal for going to Israel
The movie: The Parent Trap (and I didn't watch it this time either).
The best thing about the Lufthansa planes was the map projected onto the screen showing our progress across the Atlantic or to Tel Aviv. It was nice to have a visual representation of how far we'd gotten. They also had screens showing speed, altitude, and temperature outside (on the English screen: mph, feet, and F; on the German screen: kmh, km, and C).
We finally arrived in Tel Aviv. On the way in from the airport, I kept looking at the scenery and thinking, I just flew halfway across the world to another desert. The two best things we saw on the way in were:
- The guy jogging on the highway.
- The cars parked on the freeway ramp. Evidently Tel Aviv has a serious parking crisis: too many cars, no parking structures. It's now the law new buildings have to have parking.
I looked at the architecture of the city and thought, This city looks like it was built during the 60s and 70s. "That's because it was," said Darin. The roads are as narrow as if they were built during the 60s and 70s BC, however.
I also noticed that the buildings had that corroded, run-down look I see in buildings in the Caribbean and I wondered why that was. Then we turned a corner and there was the Mediterranean Sea. Whoops. Hadn't known Tel Aviv was a port city.
We checked into the hotel and fell asleep immediately. I kept waking up, thinking, We have to get to dinner.
We eventually got up to have dinner with some of Carole's cousins, who live in Tel Aviv, Shula and Asaf. Darin was a Chatty Cathy doll, but Mitch, Scott, and I were zoned out and silly. If I stopped focusing for any length of time, I started to fall asleep. I also could barely eat. All of the meals we'd had on the plane dampened my appetite (and I wasn't the only one).
This trip to Israel is courtesy of Carole's mother, who died a few months ago and left Carole some money, which Carole is using to pay for this trip. Which is a nice way of remembering someone.
The trip works like this: we have a hired tour guide (Micky Raveh, sometimes spelled Mikki) who will drive us around the country for two weeks on a 10-person bus. The bus is just big enough for the 6 of us, given that 4 of us are Adler men. Carole originally wanted to do a big tour, with one of those big tour buses, but Scott said, Uh, no. So Carole arranged this, which is much better.
(Okay, let's see if I can get this straight: Carole wanted to do the trip this year, and Darin tried to talk her out of it because it was too short notice. Then she suggested doing it next year and I said, Uh, no, no way--the Millenium celebrations will probably be going strong in the Holy Land, and perhaps we'd want to be elsewhere. She agreed, so we went this year instead.)
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com