runlindsayrun

Day One

(Bear with me... I have a little bit of a pet peeve against people who go on and on about their vacations, all self-obsessive and annoying. Unfortunately for you, this site is primarily my personal journal - and so it's up to you whether you want to read or not :)

Geoff's friend Alan drove us to the airport on Wednesday morning. No big adventures, which is always a good thing when you're at an airport. It was Halloween, so I wore my cat ears (purchased especially for this occasion). I pretty much got winked and meowed through security. A little creepy, but I had amazing service all day. I'm pretty sure I could have smuggled ANYTHING with those ears on.

At the airport, we met up with Chris (the JIM coordinator and trainer for our team) and four other women who were travelling to Athens with us for the race. We were only with them until Toronto, though - for some reason, Geoff and I were the only people on the Manitoba team who flew through Zurich. Everyone else flew through Frankfurt - and we beat them to the hotel in Athens by a good 5 or 6 hours.

The only *real* adventure we had in the air was a medical quasi-emergency in the middle of the night, somewhere between Toronto and Zurich. An older (okay, forget politically correct - OLD) woman on the plane started feeling sick and was disoriented and clammy and shaky. Her husband and the flight attendants reacted quickly - and kind of over-reacted - and it turned out she'd just been late taking some meds. But it all resulted in lights on and loud talking, interrupting our only chance for sleep. Awesome. I'm glad she's okay, but SERIOUSLY. It made for a long day on Thursday.

I hate long flights. I always forget how much I hate them, but I really do. I'm cool for about four or five hours, and then the full-on claustrophobia sets in and I have to concentrate on breathing properly and think about as many other things as I can. On this flight, I had lots of TV episodes to distract me: The Office, Arrested Development, Entourage. And a great book that I started reading just before our trip: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein). Reading about torture and unethical psychological experiments really kind of put my flight panic into perspective. Until I got to the chapter that talked about how depriving people of a sense of time makes them go crazy, and I realized that - with the time changes - we'd totally missed an entire night. And that made me a little crazy again :)

Labels: Greece, Joints in Motion, My Life, The Boy, Travel

posted by Lindsay @ 1:14 PM