Tern Lake Sunset

Veteran's Day

The Africa Journals, Ch. 67, The Long Journey Home

  The Africa Journals

Chapter 67

The Long Journey Home

“It is the extra security demanded by America for anyone entering it.   Your country has many enemies…”

My seatmate’s words whirl like a tornado in my head as the South African Air airbus A340 lands on the runway in Dakar, Senegal.  “…many enemies…many enemies.”   Of the various thoughts that jump in and join the frenzy, one speaks louder than the rest:   What a shame.

As soon as the debarking passengers clear the aisles, my seatmate says, “Excuse me, I need to stand.   My knees are killing me.”   I rise and, much to my surprise, after eight hours of the most discomfort I’ve ever had on a long flight, I can stand, and I remain standing.   So do all the through-passengers in my cabin.

Uniformed personnel come aboard and validate the "many enemies."   Some search over, under, and around vacant seats.   They check seat pouches, between seats, under seats, overhead bins.   Uniformed personnel with German Shepherd dogs in harness come aboard.   They start at the very end of the plane and walk slowly up the aisles, the dogs’ noses twitching as they search.

Another team of uniformed personnel come aboard and walk to the end of the plane.  Each holds two aerosol containers over their shoulders and spray as they walk forward.   They are spraying an insecticide for yellow fever, I assume.   I cover my face.

We are on the ground for at least an hour in the middle of the night.  Finally, it’s time for take-off.   My long-suffering seatmate finds relief in an empty seat immediately in front of me where he has eight feet in which to stretch his legs.

Someone grabs the empty row across from me, alas.   But!   I now have two seats to myself and once the plane is in the air and the seat belt sign goes off, I curl up facing the seats, pull a blanket over me, and soon I’m in la-la land for the most of the flight, another ten hours crossing the Atlantic to Washington D.C.

We land at Washington/Dulles International.   I clear customs and board a regional United jet for Chicago, where snowplows are clearing snow from the runways.

Snow in Chicago.   Or maybe this is D.C.   Pretty rummy right now.

I’m hungry and Chicago/O’Hare airport is heaven for hungry people.   I’m in a different terminal than usual and I find a crowded little restaurant called Tortas Frontera where I order a bowl of corn and poblano chili chowder.   It’s heaven in heaven; just what I needed.  A City Guide poster on the wall gives it the number one slot in the 10 Best Airport Restaurants.

Corn and Poblano chili chowder.

I wonder when United began painting its planes peach and lime, then realize it's the de-icing fluid.

Back onto a United Boeing for a four and a half hour flight to Seattle.

 

Landing in Seattle.

That sure looks like ice on the wing.

 

By this time, it’s evening and I overnight once again for an early flight to Alaska the next day, whatever date that is.   I’ve flown four flights with more than 27 and a half hours in the air.   Three and a half hours to go tomorrow.

I take a shower, go right to bed, and dream of Africa.  

 

Tomorrow, I go home.

The Africa Journals, Ch. 66, I Resemble that Passport Photo

The Africa Journals

Chapter 66

I Resemble that passport photo

Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.—Al Gore

Bags packed and carried away by the bell hops, passport and plane tickets located, carry bag in hand, I walked out the front entrance of the Cullinen Southern Sun Hotel and into the blast furnace of Cape Town.   What happened?   All three weeks in southern Africa had been pleasantly warm until today, and now the breeze served as a blowtorch, plastering us the flames of Hades.

Someone said it was 105 degrees.  I thought they were lying; I thought it was much hotter than that.   Maybe they meant 105 degrees centigrade.   That would be closer.

Leaving the Cullinen Southern Sun Hotel

Brian was standing on the sidewalk next to the coach that would take us to the airport.  He would not be going to Johannesburg to make sure his flock got to the right gate the overnight flight to the USA.   It made sense because he lived in Cape Town. 

He lamented the goodbyes like this:   “Just when I have you trained, you’re leaving and they’re sending me a new group to train.”   Ah, the perils of a travel guide.

I gave him a hug and thanked him for sharing his country with us.  “Did you enjoy it?” he asked in his charming accent.   When I assured him I’d loved every minute of the trip, he said, “Sometimes single travelers feel left out.  I felt like that after my divorce.

“No,” I replied.   “I’m comfortable with my own company.”   I then told him of my husband succumbing to Alzheimer’s Disease a few years prior, and how much my life has changed since then.  “I don’t have time for negativity in my life,” I said.  We hugged again and I got on the air conditioned coach.

Brian came down the passageway handing out bottles of cold water and saying goodbye again to all.   I knew he was concerned about us finding the right departure gate in the large Johannesburg terminal—even though we’d been through there before—when he said, “Turn left and remember the big hole in the floor!”   The “big hole in the floor” was similar to a multi-level atrium where we could see to the floor below.

A last look at the table cloth covering Table Mountain.

A last glimpse of the squatter shacks on the outskirts of Cape Town.

And then we were off, first to the Cape Town airport, landing in Johannesburg, then boarding South Africa Air for a long flight to Washington, D.C., with a stop in Senegal.  I looked at my boarding pass suspiciously.   The assigned seat number didn’t look like the seat I had selected. 

And I was right.   Rather than a window seat in large exit door area, the kind where your tray folds into the arm rest, I was in the row behind it on the aisle.

And with that, the most agonizing eight hours and forty minutes of air travel EVER began!  

My seat mate was a tall, thin African man dressed in a business suit.   Right away I saw he had a pillow between his knee and the seat back in front of him.  I looked at my own knees.   As short as I am, my knees also touched the seat pouch in front of me.

Across the aisle, the entire middle row of four seats was empty.  I put my jacket, blanket, and pillow on the nearest one, crossed my fingers and hoped they remained empty.

It was not to be.   Just before the door closed, three African women boarded and noisily stole those seats right out from under my covetous stare.  They were in long African-style dresses, dripping with jewelry, and sporting intricate hair dos.  The third woman was much older, perhaps a mother or grandmother, and she was wearing something akin to a burka, though her face was exposed.  The two women ignored her.  Hmm, I thought.   A chaperone? 

My seat mate and I started talking.  He was originally from Zimbabwe and now living in South Africa, and was going to America to attend a conference.  He asked where I’d visited and we talked about that, along with the different foods I’d sampled, history I’d learned, and so on.  I asked him if he would like my pillow for his other knee, but he kindly refused, saying that knee was okay.  He said the women opposite were from Senegal, and in response to my question, said he could tell by their dress.

Some of the group at our final dinner in Africa.   Ann, Henry, Kathy, Peter, Susan, Jen, Ken, and Gail is standing.

Jim and Lois

Carl and Arlene

Don and Susan

This flight had boarded in the evening and was a 19-plus-hour flight to Dulles International in Washington, D.C., so there came a time when I tried to go to sleep, “tried” being the operative word here.  As the hours wore on at the pace of evolution, another part of my body would join the parts already in agony.  I tried thinking about our group's last dinner together in Cape Town.   I tried slow breathing in and out.

The two Senegalese women across the aisle wouldn’t shut up, making my quest for sleep an impossibility.  The third never uttered a sound.  I looked forward to arriving in Dakar, just for the relief of a break in this ungodly flight and the hope that a different seat would open for my suffering seat mate.  

Carol and Tony.  The rest of the group wouldn't hold still long enough to get an in-focus photo.   That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

My dinner salad

Stuffed chicken roll with potatoes and veggies.

I stared at the seats along the aisle, mentally measuring the leg room, until I was convinced my row was at least three inches shorter.  Sleep was impossible.

Finally, finally, the plane began its descent into Dakar.   My seat mate said we would have to deplane and go through a security inspection in Dakar.   “But we’ve already been through security in Johannesburg.   We didn’t deplane coming over.   Why now?”

“It is the extra security demanded by your country for anyone entering it.   Your country has many enemies…”

The endless inland landscape.

From Cape Town at the bottom, northeast to Johannesburg, then northwest to Senegal, next map.

Location of Dakar, Senegal

An Ann Linquist Writing Prompt: A Night on the Town in Phoenix

Online writing instructor Ann Linquist hosts a blog wherein we writer wannabees can play. She gives us a prompt and with that we run amok.

I daydreamed my way through the mail route today, making up one sentence in response to her latest prompt.

The prompt: 

Russleman Greefolder

Old gum underneath the café table

Underwear label

Relentless smog

Dog and a beer

 The story:

A Night on the Town in Phoenix

Long after those crew-cut jerks with their mirrored Ray Ban Aviators and coiled wires behind their ears slammed him onto the scorching sidewalk of Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix without so much as a how-de-do or a do-si-do, long after that black-robed harridan shattered her gavel and shot him a look that left no doubt she felt she was dealing with slug slime, and long after those phony white-toothed piranhas decamped with their behemoth satellite TV trucks to another circus, Russleman Greefolder lay marinating in his own sweat on a cot in a sauna-like tent, clad only in Sheriff Joe’s mandatory pink boxers stamped with the acronym for Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, wondering why, after a satisfying all-afternoon-and-into-the-evening interlude tipping a couple cold Coronas with lime wedges—well, maybe more than a couple but, hey, who’s counting when it’s 117 in the shade out there,  your dog is sprawled in the sawdust at your feet, and you’re hoisting a few in the air-conditioned refuge of Jose’s Cantina—why oh why he chose that moment, that particular moment when he was floating out the door of Jose’s in the unrelenting smog of sudsy befuddlement, to drop his drawers and rid himself of the annoying label sewn into the waistband of his X-rated (certainly not XXX-rated) boxers that his ex, when she was still his wife, bought for him at that adult shop over on what he liked to call Not-So-Grand street, just as the president’s motorcade and its gaggle of black Suburbans with dark-tinted windows was passing, all of which resulted in an indecent exposure rap eternally stuck to him like old gum underneath a café table.



Care to see what others wrote?    http://annlinquist.com/2014/10/29/a-night-on-the-town/