A Journey of a Thousand Miles

What a long fun trip it's been, between leaving my house in Charlotte at 11:30am EDT Wed, until I'm writing this at 11:15pm Friday Hyderabad Time.

Both my house sitter and my friend driving me to the airport showed up right on time. The guy at the United curbside was very helpful with my additional (50% overweight! Damned contraband!) bag (I don't know why my ADDITIONAL bag had to the one that was OVERWEIGHT, but that's a question for a different day.) Also our CLT through to Hyderabad reservation didn't link properly with the check-in kiosks, so between two check-in agents and myself we overrode the confusion so that I could check in and pay for my bag. Easy peasy.

As always I took the Terminal A TSA line, and it was speedy and hassle-free. I think I'm a little overly excited for the taste of the TSA folks, because I always think the spread-'em-and-reach-for-the-sky is over before it actually is over, and so they have to make a show of resetting the scanner. Perhaps my hearing is totally shot, or maybe they don't speak clearly and loudly enough to help people don't do this every day. Not sure which….

I got to my gate a full two hours before the flight, and was able to quietly enjoy my poppy seed bagel with peanut butter, last American lunch. It was here that I learned that my laptop doesn't like freebie wifi, but only snacks on WPA-2 bits and bytes (which was never offered to us -- in any of the airports or flights). Additionally, my attempts to add a new book to my Nook failed (I've assumed because my credit card had already been set to Out of the Country).

This gave me plenty of time to people-watch and to meet other folks who were also travelling to India (and having confusion with the wifi as well).

Lax and The Fam cut it a little short, not surprisingly because Mellissa had to finish up her End-of-Grades exams just as we were rushing for the flight. They also ran into the dropped linkage issue at the kiosk -- weird, as I assumed my manual override would have cured the issue for the entire group.

But no need to hurry because our CLT to Dulles leg had been delayed 30 minutes. We chatted excitedly about our trip, while Rose practiced her fashion runway strut-and-turn -- "Give it some 'tude, grrrl".