Day 1 - An Uneventful Plane Trip

After waking at 4:00AM (or, rather, washing our faces; not many of us slept with all the packing we had to do), we all piled into the car and Kevin drove us to Reagan National Airport. Much to Mommy’s dismay, a very small plane took us to Boston for the first leg of our flight. At Celeste’s count, there were fifteen passengers total.

Adding a bit of excitement to our morning, to get to the plane we had to walk across the tarmac and climb up the stairs to the plane. Daddy said that this is the “old-fashioned way” of doing things; doesn’t he fear dating himself with comments like that? Ah well.

Our flight to Boston was rather short, and we soon found ourselves inside Boston International Airport. Until now I had been wearing my short leg brace, but my foot started bothering me at this point so I sat down and strapped on the walking cast. Naturally, security gave my quite a hassle, and I found myself subjected to a wanding, pat down, and various chemical tests. Had I been less tired I may have found these chemical tests fascinating.

Mommy and Elizabeth fell fast asleep and spent most of our trip to Heathrow snoozing. Though running on very little sleep ourselves (Celeste had one hour), Celeste and I watched “The Interpreter” twice. Despite my plans to read all the way to England, I was way too tired to navigate my way through the labyrinth of Scottish accents in Rob Roy.

Other than dealing with a bevy of witchy flight attendants apparently uninterested in customer service, the flight was uneventful. Approximately 6.5 hours after leaving Boston we arrived in Heathrow. It took us roughly two hours to get through security, passport services, and “reclaim” our baggage downstairs. While standing in line to have our passports stamped, Mommy got into conversation with an elderly African (Sierra Leone, to be exact) Londoner returning from “holiday” in the States. He said that he taught for forty-two years at a University in his native country. Leave it to my mother to meet the most interesting people.

Since Daddy and Kenny still hadn’t arrived to pick us up at this point, Mommy watched the bags while the girls and I browsed the airport stores. We were interrupted by Kenny in the middle of choosing scents of shampoo we liked at Boots. Soon enough we piled into our big blue van, which was rather ugly on the outside but very comfortable inside, and started our drive to the Base.

It took about an hour and a half to get home and unload our overnight bags. The room was fairly nice as TLFs go, despite the old bubble gum in the drain and the cheerios stuck to the lamp in the common area (Elizabeth discovered these). We ate a quick dinner and climbed into bed.

While Mommy and Daddy fell asleep immediately, the rest of us stayed up for a while and watched British television. It was some sort of entertainment program showing the UK premiere of “Fantastic Four”, and included fun interviews with the stars. A highlight was Ioan Gruffudd (pronounced Jo-ann Griffith) demonstrating how he “kissed the air” in the movie when he had to kiss Invisible Girl. The general consensus in the room after the show was that Ioan was “classy” and the favorite, Jessica Alba was pretty, and Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis were pretty shallow.

The fun being over, we all fell asleep at 1:45 AM British time.