Boarding the plane and waiting for take-off from Paris took about an hour - which makes sense because there were a lot of people on that plane. The good: I had an aisle seat again, which makes it way easier if I needed to get up. The bad: as soon as my area was settled in, a baby screamed for the entire hour everyone else was boarding, and I was trying to continue to be patient. The really bad: everyone who knows me knows I don’t like it when people move my stuff without asking me (obviously not the flight attendants, that’s their job, I get it), but three different people tried to move my luggage and rearrange it and I had to tell them three separate times that it doesn’t fit that way.
That was the beginning of my irritation with everything. Due to the fact that I can’t sleep on planes, I had a lot of movie-watching ahead of me. As soon as we took off and I said a prayer to Hermes, I tried messing with the screen in front of me. It didn’t work for a while, but I finally got it to work shortly after taking off.
The first movie I watched was the remake of Overboard, which I forgot was a remake until halfway into it because Folklore Fiancé had talked about it with me before. The other movies I watched were 12 Years a Slave because I hadn’t seen it yet - it was really intense and a little confusing with the jumps in time, but overall a good film - and then I watched A Quiet Place, which was also really intense (although the baby at the front of my section screamed through half of it, so the effect wasn’t quite the same - yes, I had it up loud but airline headphones can only do so much). I could feel myself holding my breath during the movie. I didn’t find it to have a satisfactory ending, though.
Since I decided to watch pretty heavy movies (and didn’t end up watching Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring like I said I would (sorry, Kiwi)), the rest of the time was taken up by watching pretty mindless sitcoms, like The Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, and the first two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (I managed to finish the second episode all the way through as we were in taxi in the flight).
The food on the flight was okay, but the chocolate on the French flights are always 86% cacao or something ridiculous like that. The Bulgarian chocolate was bigger and milk chocolate, so I liked it much better.
The real problems began, however, when we landed. I got up right away, pulled down my luggage, and got ready to depart. However, things have changed since I last traveled internationally. We had to get off, go through passport control, and then go get our checked bags and re-check them for our next flight. I was extremely anxious that my bag had been lost because I didn’t see it for a while, so I moved to where the conveyor belt from the hold let out, so I could see it as it was coming down.
It took a while before I saw it, and I think I got over excited and intense, because I picked it up and then it hit the ground really hard. Then it went lopsided. Oh no, what did I do, fuck, was all that went through my mind. Because, sure enough, I leaned it back and the wheel popped off, so I picked it up and put it in my grocery bag with my snacks. There were three screws exposed on the bottom of the bag, and cracks in both the top on that side and the bottom near the wheel part. (When I re-checked my bag, the attendant told me to just make a claim when I got to Las Vegas, so yet another thing to do…)
We were directed where to go for connecting flights, dropped off the checked bags, and then had to go through security. This security was strange, though, because they told us to just put everything in our bags, leave our shoes on, and we could go through. I tossed all of my stuff in my carry-on or my laptop bag (we didn’t have to take out laptops, either). I guess perhaps it was because it was the connecting flights and they might have a different protocol. I got through it pretty quickly, which was surprising to me because of my random wheel I had in the grocery bag.
I checked the monitors to see where my gate would be and it said A11, and I was at the F gates. I followed the signs to get to the A gates and I rode another “Plane Train,” as they called it to get to my gate.
Just a few more hours until I’m home.
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