Flight home
After a very short night, I had to catch the hotel’s 7am shuttle to get to the Cairo airport. 7am also represented 11pm Colorado time, or almost exactly the time I would get home that night (door to door, it’s about 24 hours). That’s never a pleasant thought, but I knew I was so tired that I would sleep on the airplane. Of course I had to get to the airplane first…
Western airports tend to be orderly places where people naturally form lines and everything is marked. Your more likely to see a 60 woman in a Burka throw an elbow than you will an accurate flight schedule. Furthermore, I am convinced that they think good customer service shows weakness. The Cairo airport is a mob scene of people crowding around. There are also plenty of supposedly helpful people who just pull you from one line and put you in another (not a faster line, just a different line) and then demand a tip. Another difference is that you clear your luggage trough security before you check in to your flight. This presented a problem for me since I always travel on an e-ticket. After waiting 15 minutes in a throng of people pushing their way to a small opening toward security, I was informed that I needed to get some sort of confirmation that I had a flight. So I dragged my bags over to Egypt Air “Customer Service” (remember what I said about customer service). Another 15 minute wait and a rude attendant yielded a dot matrix printed piece of paper that somehow would get me into security. 20 more minutes and several flights of stairs with 130 pounds of luggage in tow completed the task of asking for compensation for my lost bags (which they said would take at least a month if allowed).
Finally I made it back to security. After years of traveling with my gun, I’ve learned a few things about getting it through foreign airports. It’s totally legal to travel with it in checked luggage; but be honest, would you want to explain to some Egyptian guy the difference between a firearm and an air gun? My packing skill worked and the gun went through without raising any eyebrows. An hour more checking in, passport control, and another security checkpoint, and I was finally able to relax. The flight from Cairo to London went by in what seemed like a few minutes as I slept almost the entire way.
In London, I waited at the Star Alliance Lounge until right before my flight. As I was boarding, my dad called on my Blackberry. I thought that was strange since he knew I was traveling abroad so I answered the call. He was calling to let me know that his mom died this morning. A few weeks ago, I was in DC and scheduled to have dinner with my aunt and uncle and visit my grandmother. My grandmother broke her pelvis that day so we had to cancel. Fortunately I had a chance to see my grandmother last fall one last time. She had suffered from sever dementia for a number of years and was living in a nursing home down the street from my aunt and uncle until she died. Because I grew up on the opposite side of the country from her, I did not know my grandmother very well; but I feel really badly for my dad and his siblings with their loss.
The flight from London to Chicago went by quickly also. I had an entire row of three seats to myself. This gave me the opportunity for four more hours of sleep. That made me very happy because I need to get right back on to Colorado time for training. Sleeping on the return flight always seems to help me with that.
Finally came the flight from Chicago to Colorado Springs. I always try to avoid that flight and connect through Denver because it is delayed so often. As I presented my ticket to board the plane, the attendant said they had been looking for me. Great, sounded like the start of my trip was happening all over again! However, for once my luck improved. They were overbooked in Economy and were bumping me to First Class because of my airline status. That was a big sigh of relief and some much appreciated leg room. The flight left early, had a tail wind, and landed way ahead of schedule. Five days, 15,000 miles, 3 continents, and nearly 45 hours sitting on airplanes… the life of a pentathlete!
