September 6-7, 2018: From CA to PO…land

That’s a terrible title.

I’m sitting at Dulles International Airport waiting to board my flight to Copenhagen. From there, it’s another 3 hour layover and an hour or so flight to Poland.

An Aussie friend of mine recently posted the progression of his weariness as he took multiple connections and I thought I’d follow suit.

Here’s me at 5:50 am this morning. An early flight always sounds good… until you realize you have to get up even earlier to get to the airport on time.

Those people next to me? They could fall asleep with ease. I was jealous. Despite my eyelids feeling like they weighed a couple of player pianos, I couldn’t sleep. So I finished reading Shogun, one of the supposed America’s Best Books over at PBS. I distinctly remember as a kid seeing that large white dustjacketed hardback on my parents’ bookshelf, filed next to Roots and one of those Michener epics, and inexplicably a green two volume history of the White House they won at some function. Shogun is kind of the Game of Thrones if its day. In the end, it was a fun way to pass the time but I’m not sure I’d call it one of the best books ever. It is more worthy than Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey, so, shrug… it can be on the list.

Whilst killing more time as the kid behind me kicked the seat repeatedly, annoying the couple next to me even more than me… which is saying something… I was struck by this 737’s excessive labeling of items, from a safety card to a coat hanger. I half expected there to be a post-it note on the outside with the word “plane” scrawled on it.

Arriving in Dulles, I swear Kristen Stewart was riding the shuttle to the international terminal with me. I tried faking a phone call telling the imaginary callee that I *loved* Catch That Kid. She didn’t seem to respond but I still think it was her.

On top of that, Potbelly was trying to gaslight me. There is no cookie.

***

I’ve always dreaded eight hour flights. Not because they’re long but because they’re too short. A five hour flight is long, a 12-15 hour flight is long. But an eight hour flight? It’s just the wrong amount of time.

In the early naughts when I would commute back and forth to a job in the UK, I’d try and avoid connecting flights on the east coast, preferring to fly through DFW or if I was really lucky a direct flight to LHR. The reason being that I wanted the longer flights. It enabled me to hopefully get some sleep.

I have trouble sleeping on planes. The seats are obviously uncomfortable, designed as if by the Marquis de Sade. But more than that I’m often just off on time zones. Usually a flight that gets into a place in their local time morning means I’m landing just as *my* body clock says it’s time to go to sleep. Which makes the eight hour flight the toughest of times for me.

It usually takes 90 minutes from takeoff to meal service… and I’m too cheap to skip the meal service feeling as I do it’s included in the price of my airfare.

[A quick sidebar on today’s SAS flight. I’m apparently in Go! Class, which means outside of one complimentary soft drink with the one-choice beef meal, everything else is for purchase. A can of soda at 36,000 feet costs more than a bottle at the airport. It’s not highway robbery… it’s skyway robbery.]

WTF SAS?!

So after the meal service, you’re down to 6.5 hours. Assuming the breakfast service is about an hour or hour and a half from landing, you’re looking at a tight four hours of “rack time,” and it can feel like the Spanish Inquisition in those seats. If you don’t fall asleep immediately after the meal, you’re looking at even worse chopped up sleep time. On a longer flight, there’s more wiggle room between the two meals and thus better odds of dozing off.

I’ve slept nary a wink on this flight, though I did try closing my eyes and not moving for a few hours. The free range toddlers belonging to the folks across the aisle from me thought it funny to grab me and a few times. To my credit, I never lost it with the kids – they don’t know any better – but I did stink eye the parents. I get it, they’re tired, the kids are tired, I’m tired, it takes an SAS Go! cabin to raise a village or whatever. But I just wanted some shut-eye. Not even sleep… just some literal shut-eye. And that turbulence you feel means the seat belt sign is on. Buckle up your kid.

Unable to sleep and not really up for the movie options on the seatback screen, and too lazy to pull out my Surface Pro from my backpack, I figured I’d pass some time with the other entertainment options. Games — sure, that sounds like fun:

And yet, it’s not “games” — it’s “game.” Singular. Just one.

Each game of chess means there’s one less remaining to be played.

This isn’t like my still painful blueberry muffin debacles (which as you’ll recall was a muffin with a single blueberry and thus I guess emblematic of truth in advertising… prompting me to always order “a blueberries muffin” which only makes baristas and muffin mongers look at me like I’m crazy… which, ya know, fair play). I don’t think I’ll ever get over blueberry muffin.

And yet, this “games”/”game” thing? This is yet another first world problem that I’m going to whinge about for all time.

***

Here’s what I look like upon landing in Copenhagen:

And this is proof positive that Denmark is incredibly expensive — that cheeseburger is USD$22. It doesn’t even look good.

***

I’m running low on battery charges and I foolishly packed my power plug adapters in my checked luggage. This is what I get for not wanting to lug my other bag around airports. My back and shoulder and neck say thank you… my technology says “bleep-blop, bork bork.” That means, “you’re an idiot, Kevin.” Oh and “eep, opp, ork, ah ah” means “I love you.”

***

This entry is little more than a series of strange stray thoughts, the rantings and ravings of a jetlagged fool. No wonder I had some trouble at work back in the day when I got into London. In my defense, there wasn’t a lot of time to go from the frying pan into the fire there — the wheels touched down and the clock started ticking again. I still have dreams and am haunted by nightmares about that place.

***

I’m struggling with my English to Polish / Polish to English google translations. I’m still not sure where I need to go for my bib pickup and who knows where the start line is. Fortunately, I’ve got a day and a half to sort that out.

I’m downing some Coke Zero to try and reset my coherence. The old habits of transatlantic commuting never die.

On the plus side, even though Copenhagen’s Airport prices are exploitative and dastardly, they’re still less than I would’ve paid onboard SAS.

Seriously. WTF SAS?!

***

It’s only an hour flight from Copenhagen to Wroclaw. We’re on a small-ish plane, yet still there’s a distinction between SAS Plus and SAS Go!

On the plus side, I flew all the way to Poland and got California Almonds as a snack.

FACEPALM, as the kids may have said a few years back and now probably say, I don’t know, some inscrutable slang term I’ll never understand or frankly probably ever know.

This by the way is what I look like after landing at 12:20 PM local time in Wroclaw, the end of the flights, and the beginning of the race around town.

It’s always a thrill when you see your bag at baggage claim. I never know if it’s going to make it to me or not. I’m sure eventually it will, but I hadn’t packed a spare set of running clothes in my carry-on this trip, meaning I was at the mercy of SASsy baggage services. But they came through. And there was much rejoicing… or at least a sigh of relief from this tuckered traveler.

I grabbed a bus out to the expo, opting to hit that today in the hopes of avoiding the supposed crowds forecast for tomorrow. Besides, I had to kill a bit of time before I could check into my AirBNB anyway. Seemed like the best laid plan.

That said, the Polish language is Greek to me… in that I don’t have a clue how to pronounce, read, or even recognize even possible lexical and/or grammatical similarities. Here’s my connecting tram stop sign telling me something about the marathon… I’m guessing based on past experiences that it’s warning folks the buses/tramlines won’t be running as a lot of idiots in sneakers will be. But I’ve been wrong many, many times so if anyone asks me something I try and warn them that they should, Latinly, cave ut hominem, sed cogitat et scit non realiter: “beware the man who thinks he knows but may not really,” with “the man” being “me.”

Because of past experiences at marathons and expos, I sorta breezed through the packet pickup. When they didn’t have an English version of the waiver I had to sign, as it was available exclusively in Polish, I scribbled my Kevin S. Hanna signature and dated it figuring, meh, what’s the worst I could be signing away? I don’t have a firstborn. And I sold my soul so long ago that the amortization table has it worth not a whole lot anyway. The vendors and display stands were the usual, usual — Powerbars, shoes, other races both near and far.