Arrived safely at JFK yesterday at 2:35 (causing surprise when the flight attendant announced that we were right on time and the time was now 2:32; must've been that time warp over the Long Island Sound that we flew through).
Took a while to get through customs (and the US Customs Service has set this up in an inefficient, confusing and stupid manner and their people were rude to me - welcome home!). Took another while for the vans we'd hired to get their fannies around and pick us up. Then a dear friend fetched me from the drop-off point, and we went to Newark to retrieve my husband from Lufthansa.
We arrived exactly as he was clearing passport control, and managed to retrieve him without incurring more than $3 in parking. During the retrieval process, I learned that Lufthansa's computer messed up, and assigned him to the same seat as a mom traveling with three small children. So they very kindly bumped him into business class, where he feasted on spicy prawns and cognac, while some four hours ahead of him on the airways, I was sitting with my knees up my nose in coach, hoping my hips would still remember what walking was when we arrived.
We followed the retrieval with a festal dinner at a marvelous local diner (calling it a mere "diner" is tantamount to praising with faint damns, although the beer was...well, not Austrian or Czech, for sure), came home, and fell over. At one point during the night, he got up to go to the bathroom and I woke up and momentarily tried to place what hotel this was, and what city...
And at 4:30 my body decided that it was really 10:30 in the morning and I should be getting my lazy ass on the bus! So here I am, posting and trying to find the keys to my office desk and re-routing my brain to settle for mere coffee instead of cafe melange, and figure out how to deal with the awesome loneliness of not spending the day wandering some beautiful city with dear friends, and topping it off by singing.
3 comments:
Welcome home! Have had a blast following along via the official Schola blog and itinerary and your posts here. The juxtaposition of your days with mine was quite humorous -- the exotic and cultural vs. the normal mundanity.
Welcome back, Sweetie! Remember -- if you never come down from the Mountaintop, then the Mountaintop Experience doesn't inform your day to day life...
Love you, hope to catch up soon. Cedar
Oh, I know re: coming down from the mountaintop. We were fortunate in that we were gone long enough to bond, and not long enough to get so sick of each other that we never wanted to see each other again. It's just amazingly lonely, when you've gotten accustomed to being surrounded by good friends, all out on a common mission, and you go back to being an anonymous moving body in Penn Station, is all.
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