The Voyage Home

So, we woke up to find that while it had snowed in the night, it hadn't snowed heavily judging by the layer of snow on our car. Taking the view that dilly-dallying would not be wise, we got up quickly and headed off, pausing only to phone the airline and check what our options were if we couldn't get out of Ithaca. Not surprisingly, we had the cheapest and simplest of tickets, meaning that if the flight wasn't cancelled, and we weren't there, it was our problem, not theirs. Bah. All the more reason to get a move on.

One of the things I've missed out of this account so far is our difficulties in obtaining stamps. I saw a Post Office once in Manhattan very early on when we didn't need stamps, but other than that had seen nothing. When we started writing postcards, we couldn't find anywhere to buy stamps. We asked various people where we could get them, and all of their suggestions turned out to be bad ones. In Ithaca the previous day, we had seen a Post Office, but the previous day was Presidents Day, a Federal Holiday, so the Post Office was closed. Ultimately this lead to the fairly typical situation of posting all postcards as we left. Wegman's sold stamps, so on our way out Alison ran in to get stamps and post the cards, and to get me a tea from the coffee bar :-)

The roads were okay. There's really not much to tell about the drive, apart from being behind a snow-plough on Route 79 and seeing a mailbox sent flying by the stream of snow being, well, ploughed. In the end I drove all the way to NYC, rather than sharing the driving. The Taapan Zee bridge was rather impressive, being the longest bridge either of us had driven across in a long time. We saw big ice floes on the Hudson River, something I'd never seen before (and I mean ice floes on any river, before someone tries to out pedant me).

The main issue with the Taapan Zee and the other bridges, and with our general route back into NYC, was tolls. As we left Ithaca we were down to our last 8 dollars in cash. There was a point when we didn't know exactly what our tolls were going to be, especially as most of the toll bridges across the Hudson only charge going from the West to the East (ie, from the New Jersey side to the New York side). Until we knew how much the Taapan Zee toll was, we were coming up with every contingency we could think of. Thankfully, however, the tolls left us with around a dollar in cash by the time we arrived at JFK.

Oh, and there was one more thing about the car journey. Dirt. Road + Snow = Slush => Muck. Guess how full the windscreen washers were when we picked the car from the hire place? Right. They weren't. Didn't actually find this out until we had cause to try and use the washers. At first when no water came out, I figured the water was just frozen. Nuh-uh. There was no water to be frozen. This left me relying on spray of the roads, snow melting on the windscreen, and eventually a little mist spray that Alison had to keep the windscreen clean enough to drive by. Yes. Fun.

The airport was utter chaos. After getting the absolute worst service of the entire trip (in terms of speed, at least) at a "bistro" on the food court level of Terminal 1, we had to queue to check in. I'm not entirely sure how long we were there for, but an hour and a quarter or so before our flight was due to leave (I'm guessing this means we were there 45 minutes at that point) they started fast-tracking all the people on our flight to the front of the queue, and guess what? The other people in the queue started fussing over this. Never mind that they had more time to get to their flight. The flight was very busy, and at this point my logic hadn't ticked over enough to work out why. When it came to be our turn to check-in, we could only get seats one behind the other. This always helps.

Of course, once you've checked in you have to go through security. And if we thought the queue to check-in was long... well. The old logical cells still weren't working, so I was just putting it down to utter disorganisation that all the queues were so long. We got fast-tracked into another queue at security too. One guy who showed definite signs of being an obnoxious twat almost got himself arrested going through security. Tempers were all quite obviously frayed a little.

Alison and I sat down pretty much at the point the plane was due to take off. There was an empty seat next to me, and the very nice lady whose seat it was agreed when she turned up to swap with Alison so that the two of us could sit together. Just before this I found out from the lady two seats away from me why the flight was so packed. There had been flights cancelled the previous day. She was meant to have flown out 24 hours before, from Newark Airport. Newark was still closed, but JFK was open. Presumably this meant there were a fair number of people on this flight who were meant to have flown out of JFK the day before too.

And then we just waited. There was a problem locating certain passengers. This is always good when you're trying not to be nervous about airborne terrorism. More to the point, there was a problem with the luggage loading mechanism, because of the cold weather. Then we had to wait for the wings to be de-iced. When we eventually took off, we were running more than two hours late. Alison had even had time to beta-read chapter 2 of Targeted.

We chose to watch one of the many in-flight movies available, Sweet Home Alabama. Only the opening sequence bears particular mention, because it was set in New York. As we watched it Alison and I kept pointing at our screens and nudging each other, grinning. About halfway through the film I decided I was more interested in getting some sleep. Just as I was settling down, the cabin crew decided to serve a meal. Bah. By the time the meal was finished it was near the end of the film, so I might just have well carried on watching. I kept pestering Alison to tell me what was going on (I was semi-dozing, but kept seeing bits without sound on her screen), and when the film ended demanded a quick summary of what happened. From what I saw, and what I was told, it was a reasonable romantic comedy, and in the right mood I could quite happily watch it all the way through.

It was now about midnight EST, 5am GMT. We had about 4 hours until we were due to land, so we decided we'd do well to get some shut-eye. In the blink of an eye it was 7.30am GMT and the cabin crew were serving breakfast. At this point my body-clock became confused. It didn't feel like it was the middle of the night, and it didn't feel like early morning either. Nor did either time feel particularly wrong. Basically, I didn't have a fucking clue.

We got put in a holding pattern for about half an hour so in the end we landed at about 9.30am GMT. By this time we'd already missed our bus back to Warwick. It wasn't much hassle to get booked onto another one, however, but it did turn out that once we'd collected our luggage and stuff that we didn't have enough time to sit down and have a full breakfast (which was Alison's Number One tip for overcoming encroaching jet-lag). Tea and a muffin had to do (never a complaint there), and then we boarded the bus.

Opposite us on the bus was a full-blown gamer geek. I'm serious, he fit the full stereotype. He had pale sun-shy skin. He had long greasy black hair, wore glasses, and to top it all off, he was wearing a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt. Oh, and he was reading an RPG manual. Now, I'm not mocking any of these attributes. I wear glasses myself a lot of the time, I'm not much given to sunning myself, I quite like Sisters of Mercy, and I've done a lot of RPG-ing in my time. Hair care is not a problem, but this is probably only because I have very short hair. But to see a walking personification of a stereotype is always something worthy of note.

We both dozed off, and fortuitously woke up just as we got to the M40/A46 roundabout. One short taxi-ride from our drop-off and we were finally home.

19.02.2003, 13:30