I am presently sitting at gate C17 at Dulles, waiting to get on the plane! We board in 10 minutes or so, so I’ll probably be writing this for a while.

The one really important thing I forgot was my iPod sync cable. I am thinking maybe I will find one in Las Vegas (there’s a mall on the strip, I think), sync my iPod so I can get my podcasts and watch the episode of CSI that I missed but have in iPod format, and then return the cable. I also forgot the travel guides I have, but presumably I can get that stuff online.

I had no problems going through security; while we were sitting at the gate I filled my med box. I was surprised that I didn’t have to turn on my laptop, I just sent it through the scanner in its own tray. I am so excited that I can’t even think what else to say, so I am just going to post this and wait to board.

My wife says to stop looking at the airport status page, but I can’t help it. She says there’s nothing we can do and I should give it up. But when this is what it says, how can I not be sad that they pushed us to Saturday?

Due to RWYS CLOSED/SNOW & ICE, the Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) was closed as of Feb 14 at 05:00 AM EST. The date/time when the airport is expected to reopen is Feb 14 at 12:30 PM EST.
General Departure Delays: Traffic is experiencing gate hold and taxi delays lasting 15 minutes or less.

How can that not make me sad? We could have gone. I know we could have gone. They canceled our flight too far in advance before they saw how bad it really was going to be, and it wasn’t really too bad to fly. But she says to stop focusing on it…sigh. I don’t mean to complain…I’m just documenting how I feel.

I am back at the Seattle airport, behind security; my flight leaves in about two and a half hours. I have spotted several RSVP passengers; a few have Oosterdam tags on their carry-ons, a few have the ugly olive messenger bags we were all given (I have mine too), and a few - well, let’s just say the gaydar meter is off the scale. I am waiting another few minutes until the Qdoba Mexican Grill restaurant starts serving lunch, and then I will buy a vegetarian burrito to have for lunch on the plane. I already got a giant Diet Coke from Wendy’s because the tiny cup of coffee I had at breakfast (which was at 7am; it’s now 10am) was not enough. After I have acquired my burrito I will start making my way over to the south satellite terminal, which involves a short people mover ride.

I’m in Minneapolis! I had to change planes after all, which surprised me. If they’re going to put you at a different gate on a different plane with a different crew…why does it have the same flight number? Seems silly to me. I didn’t have time for much in the airport; by the time I got from one gate to the next (plus a bathroom stop) I only had a few minutes to sit before it was time to board again.

Flying out of National was pretty cool. I have only ever flown into it, and only once, so I hadn’t seen the view. I could see the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the WWII Memorial (which I have yet to see in person), the National Cathedral, the Watergate hotel, both the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and so forth.

This has taken me so long to write that it’s almost time to turn off electronic equipment again!

I am on the metro now - it’s 9:15 - and I will probably just save this post for a while because we’re about to enter the tunnel. I am totally scared of undertaking this adventure alone, but it’s too late now! The odd thing is that I know how to check in at the airport and go through the security screening and board the plane…but I have only ever done it three times before. Once was to Atlanta in 1999, and I got bumped up to first class but I was horribly ill and couldn’t enjoy it. I also flew to Charlotte in 2000 and to San Francisco (hi dagard!) in 1998.

Okay, it’s now 11:00 and I am waiting at the gate at National. I made it to the airport just fine, went to the wrong terminal at first but then I made it to the right one (had to take a shuttle). But then the outside checkin machine didn’t like me so I had to see an agent, but they wanted me to check in at the same kind of machine! They finally figured out that the paper I kept showing them said BOARDING PASS and that all I really wanted to do was check my bag. So I finally got checked in and I stopped at Starbucks for a mocha and a scone (might as well start the caloriefest now!) but the girl filled the cup too full so when I opened it to add splenda it spilled on my boarding pass! Fortunately the bar code seems okay. So I got to security and the guy teased me lightly for having a messy boarding pass, heh. No problems going through security…I didn’t beep at all! The scanner guy said “ohhh” as my bag would have been under the camera so I got worried but he must have just been talking to himself or something. Shortly after I sat down at the gate, they put my flight up on the LED board. It said “Minneapolis/Seattle” and my immediate thought was OH MY GOD I’M FLYING TO SEATTLE I HAVE NEVER BEEN THERE WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING GOING TO SEATTLE EEEEEEEE! Hopefully it will all be okay. I think I will buy a bottle of diet coke even though it will be a complete ripoff, because they only give you a little can on the plane. I also have a granola bar (graciously donated by :MK:) and a 100-calorie pack of fake Oreos.

My next update will probably be during my stop in Minneapolis. I think I have about an hour there and I will get off the plane to grab some lunch.

Saturday came too soon, of course. A and I ate our leftovers from the night before, and then had plenty of time to kill. Eventually we went to the pool bar, where I got more than a little drunk on Banana Quit and Coconut Kooler - for some reason none of the bars offered any kind of food, which might have helped me out a bit. C and :R: joined us for a bit, but then :R: left to go back to air-conditioning. The three of us moved over to Spicer’s (I think I was able to walk on my own) and shared a couple of plates of fries. We found :R: in the Television Lounge in the main hotel building, and we sat around and watched music videos for a couple of hours until it was time to go. Getting to the airport was no problem, but we did have a bit of a wait to check in. Of course they had problems printing my tickets, so it was a while before we could join the next line, the preliminary security check. While the other three stood in that line, I went and paid the $20/person departure fee. When I rejoined my friends, they’d moved about halfway through the line - only one man was checking everybody’s passports! Once we got past him, it was the usual metal detector check and then on to the waiting areas. A bought a couple of things in the duty free shops, and then they announced our flight, so everybody got up and formed a line…and stayed put. They finally announced a problem and said that boarding was canceled, so everybody sat back down…and stayed put. They didn’t update us for a long time, and finally I heard that if you showed your boarding pass at the snack bar, you could get a free non-alcoholic drink. I presented ours and got a couple of sodas; meanwhile A had ordered some cheese sandwiches from the upstairs restaurant to be brought to the snack bar, because after passing through security you had to stay there until your flight left. She also tried contacting US Airways because we could tell we’d miss our Philadelphia connection, but she couldn’t get any further than the Grenadian operator; the gate agents were utterly useless as they promised everything would be taken care of by the time we got to Philly. Our cheese sandwiches arrived within minutes of our flight being actually called for boarding; A held onto both of them even though we were in separate rows. When the flight attendant came around with the snack bags, she said “here’s your vegetarian meal” and handed me…a low-fat meal. With meat. I pushed the button and got her back, and she realized that she’d given my meal to :R: “and he’s already eating it.” Okay, fine, could she please go up to Row 12 and ask the woman for one of the cheese sandwiches? It took a while for her to figure out what I was asking (and apparently she still wasn’t clear when she asked A about it), but she did return with my cheese sandwich. I missed out on the plaintain chips and cookie, but the sandwich was heavy and compensated somewhat. The rest of the flight was uneventful; C and I did my crossword puzzles together, and we played Scrabble on my Visor. Of course we did get to Philadelphia quite late, and because that was our port of entry we all had to wait for the baggage to be unloaded and show up on the carousel, and then we had to go through customs and immigration. The baggage was the longest wait - the legal proceedings went fairly quickly, we’re American citizens and only bought souvenirs overseas, and we weren’t in a country where Mad Cow Disease is prevalent - but I don’t think there was any chance we could have made our connecting flight to BWI, even if we hadn’t been two hours late leaving Grenada.

Getting to Grenada was quite easy. I drove to BWI and didn’t have trouble finding parking in one of the satellite lots, and we had timed it perfectly to hop right onto the shuttle to the terminal. Checking in was no problem, and the line for security was long but moved quickly. (C set off the alarm and had to be swiped with a wand, but of course there was nothing to find.) We had a while to wait before our flight, but it wasn’t crowded and we boarded easily. When we got to Philadelphia, we moved quickly to get to our next gate, but then we still had some time to wait. We were all in the same row, and unfortunately that was the very last occupied row in the plane. (The row behind us was reserved for the flight attendants, one of whom was crocheting a cool handbag.) When we landed at Point Salines we were dreading the wait to get off the plane, but suddenly they announced that we would be deplaning using front and rear stairs! This made us the first ones off and put us first in line for immigration. That went very smoothly, and we were waiting at the baggage claim before it even started moving. (Naturally our bags weren’t the first to show up, but at least they all made it there.) As soon as we headed out of the claim area, we were accosted by someone offering a taxi ride - well, sure, we had to get to the hotel somehow, right? We were a bit dismayed to find that it was only a five minute drive to the Rex, as we’d thought we were to be closer to Grand Anse and St. George’s. We didn’t feel like doing much right away, of course; A and :R: got some drinks at the poolside bar (which was not accessible from the pool, but rather was adjacent to it), where I joined them a little later. Finally the four of us had dinner at the Oriental Restaurant, which had a vegetarian menu but whose pad thai wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It was good, though, and I had my leftovers packaged up to eat later (I never finished them).

Istanbul to Amsterdam

The flight was entirely uneventful. We pushed back from the gate on time, and my girlfriend was asleep before takeoff. They brought around orange juice and hot towels early on, and I read the inflight magazine. Breakfast was Turkish-catered, and included what seemed to be scrambled eggs and something like mashed potatoes packed into tight triangles. There was also a nice hot bun with butter, strawberry jam, and Turkey’s version of Laughing Cow cheese. The breakfast also included a strange cup with what looked like white cheese, something made with spinach, a tomato, and more things beneath that - but I didn’t take off the plastic wrap. They brought a tray of pastries after a bit, then later in the flight a tray of candy bars and cookies. The last service was a choice of water, orange juice, or apple juice. We landed on time in Amsterdam and while we did have to wait a bit, it wasn’t too hard getting off the plane.



Schiphol Return

We had about 90 minutes to kill before we were due at the gate - much better than racing to make the connection - so we wandered through Schipol’s “See Buy Fly” duty-free shopping areas. We picked up a couple of small trinkets in one shop for the equivalent of about $25, and then wandered around again. Only once did we encounter the other member of our group who had been on our flight from Istanbul; we later heard his flight to Atlanta being called for a 10:55 departure. We peeked at the airport’s casino and I wanted to see the chapel but for some reason the signage stopped abruptly - you’re directed to the left, and then find neither the chapel nor another sign. We headed back downstairs and my girlfriend decided to stop at a cafe. I had a raspberry yogurt drink and a fruit tart, and she had a doughnut and water. When we finished, we headed to the gate and waited by a wall. Airport staff emerged from the waiting room and began setting up a large security area with six lecterns, forcing the passengers to crowd between the rope and a moving sidewalk (which you couldn’t lean on because the handrail was moving). We were fairly close to the head of the line, and I would have let my girlfriend go first but they wanted us together. The security officer gave us an extended version of the “have your bags been with you at all times” question given at check-in in the U.S., and wanted to know about electronic battery-operated devices. my girlfriend mentioned the camera and that we each had Palm Pilots, and he entered something into an electronic keypad sitting on the lectern. He then asked where we had been prior to Amsterdam, and I told him Istanbul. He asked us more questions - how long were we in Turkey (three weeks), where did we go (western Turkey’s tourist traps)? He went off and talked to someone, then when he came back put stickers on the back of our boarding passes. He asked if we spoke Turkish, and I said not more than hello, goodbye, and where is the bathroom - the last of which he repeated in Turkish and waved us on. We waited a while in the waiting room, and when they called rows 32 and higher we headed for row 36. I had managed to get seats A and B, which are a pair on one side of the plane. There’s an aisle, a row of five seats, another aisle, and two more seats. my girlfriend let me have the window, and we sat at the gate for 45 minutes or so before pushing back around noon.



Amsterdam to Washington

We didn’t have to wait long on the runway; we taxied into position, waited our turn, and took off. I declined the first beverage service, and when it was time for the meal I was alarmed that they didn’t bring our vegetarian plates, and it didn’t help when my girlfriend confirmed that yes, on occasion they really do give away special meals to people who didn’t order them. It turned out that the regular pasta plate was vegetarian, though, so we had what was supposed to be pasta with tomato sauce but was more pasta with overcooked vegetables and light reddish-orange goo. The dish also included a mix of salads, a room temperature bun with margarine, and a strange dessert. It was partly chocolate so I didn’t have any, but my girlfriend didn’t finish hers. The pink grapefruit juice was a bit sweeter than I would have liked, but it was still good. Because we were awake, we both watched the movie. It wasn’t very good, but it did kill at least 90 minutes, and maybe as much as two hours. Around the time we hit the East Coast and turned south, they served a snack of pizza and ice cream. My girlfriend determined the pizza was worse than school pizza, and while the ice cream pops were okay, they were dipped in chocolate. She tried eating off the chocolate and letting me have the vanilla ice cream inside, but all we did was make a mess. We were just a few rows from the back of the plane, so when we landed it took forever to get out. We went under the sign for US citizens and had our customs declarations stamped, then went to wait by a luggage carousel. One of our suitcases turned up fairly quickly, but we had to wait a while for the next one. We each took a bag and went up to a customs agent. The only thing she asked was if our bags had been with us since arrival, but when I passed through she pulled my girlfriend’s declaration back out and looked at it, probably because we had the same address and each family only needs one declaration. We found the taxi counter, and I went to get some cash from an ATM. There was nothing unusual about the ride home, and we deposited our suitcases right inside the front door.

Schiphol

We arrived at an E-terminal gate at Schiphol, and expected to find our flight at nearby E10. No such luck, though, the gate had been changed to D48 - which of course was at the far end of another wing. We were already doubly delayed from two earlier problems, yet we managed to make it to our gate. I saw a lot of things I would have liked to have looked at closer, but we didn’t have time. When we reached the gate the boarding area was filled so we had to wait to even check in.



Amsterdam to Istanbul

We got settled on the plane, and then they announced there would be a 70-minute delay due to weather. They apologized for not telling us sooner, but they were already halfway through boarding when they learned of the delay. We were pretty cramped, but KLM has a good in-flight magazine that kept me entertained for most of the time sitting. They also handed out apple juice and a really good almond cookie - I even got a second one. At some point I fell asleep, and woke up to heavy turbulence and lunch on my tray table. The shaking ended after five or ten minutes, and I examined my lunch. The salad was smaller than the one on the overnight flight, and had thin beet strips on it. I had been given couscous with anise sauce, and my girlfriend had vegetarian lasagna. She said she wasn’t very hungry, so I ate her lasagna, and her salad too. I also got a good roll and put butter on it. We were given fairly tasty strawberry ice cream for dessert, and then I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until my girlfriend told me we were about to land. We made it through customs easily, and the rest of the night was rather uneventful.