[Still] Monday 9th June 2014
16.07 (or 21.07, or whatever)
Sitting in one of those tiny novelty planes with oversized propellers and one door and all that, which looks as if somebody has just got it out of a Kinder Egg, finally on the last leg of the journey to DC. This flight was as delayed as the first one – must be some sort of special offer on the moment. But that may be just as well considering how farcically long it took to go through passport control, pick up by bag, walk for a bit, put the bag back on another conveyer belt, go through security again and then get a shuttle bus to the other end of Pennsylvania to my next terminal. By the time I got there the only thing I could think of that would make me happy was getting a ‘cheesesteak pretzel’ – and you’ll have to use your imagination to work out what that looked like.
The flight to Philadelphia was very long and dull: the excitement of having a) an extra-leg-room seat, b) a window seat, and c) a whole row all to myself soon wore off once I realised I wasn’t going to get three people’s worth of food and drink, and that the first film they were going to show was The Horse Whisperer. No choices, just horses. I watched The Royal Tenenbaums and half of Double Indemnity before my laptop got bored of the flight too and decided to abandon me to the in-flight magazines.
16.20
Apparently on this make-it-yourself plane the emergency ‘flotation device’ is the seat. What?
17.05
Great view coming into the airport though – you can see everything. In fact, in my head I was playing the House of Cards theme the whole time. Actually, the guy sitting beside me does kind of look like Peter Russo. Although he lost serious brownie points with the following exchange: “Hey, I saw you have a UK passport… where are you from in England?”
22.17
I arrived safely at the House of Dreams and am now too tired to do anything like go into more details, like where that is and what I’m actually doing here.
12 Weeks a Maeve 