What If I Told You I Could Be Distant, Without Even Going Away?

October 19, 2010

This is the entry for the last day of my trip, but there's going to be a few more, I think, okay?

I probably spent about 24 hours awake, everything worked out fine, I made it home safely.

Woke up at 7:00 a.m., slipped out the door with my incredibly heavy backpack (all the items I left in London during my various short trips had to be carried with me this time), grabbed a coffee from the local Starbucks, took District and Picadilly lines to Heathrow. I got a little lost finding terminal 1 and deep in my gut I feared that I would not be allowed to travel with my passport. The relief I felt when I made it through check in and security is hard to describe.

But I prepared poorly for the flight. One book (Vernon God Little), with only 100 pages left. The American Airlines DVD player was inferior to that on Icelandair, both in terms of selection and video quality. I was forced to watch Grown Ups (pretty consistently bad, especially when the guys "joke around" with each other, and laugh hysterically, even though the material is so far from the best typically enjoyed by these guys, especially Chris Rock and Adam Sandler), and Up in the Air (which I like, but had seen it before, and the sanitized dubbing made many of the conversations semi-incomprehensible -- when Clooney points at the "Asians" at the airport he is dubbed as saying "businessmen"), several old episodes of Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Over those 9 hours to Dallas, there must have been two meals and two snacks.

Making it through customs and immigration made me breathe yet another sigh of relief. Bought the newish Jonathan Safran Foer book "Eating Animals".

Flight to LA was painless. Chatted with the lady next to me and her son (after mentioning her to my parents, learned that her husband used to live in our apartment building when I was a baby, small world).

Parents picked me up at LAX, my least favorite airport. And it was raining.

They took me to El Tarasco, a fantastic Mexican restaurant in Manhattan Beach, and I had a wet burrito, my first in months and we drove to their house.

And that was my long holiday in Europe.

Carolyn Mark -- The 1 That Got Away (With It)