Saturday: October 12
Budapest to Boston, Not Too Uncomfortable
I slept so-so last night. Getting up this morning at 5:30 (for a 6:30 departure) wasn’t as painful as I had feared. We had a breakfast with pastries, cold cuts, scrambled eggs, and sausage (along with coffee and orange juice).
The transfer to the airport was uneventful. When we checked in, he weighed my carry-on, and it was too heavy. I expected him to say that it needed to be checked, but he was fine with me taking my SLR out of my suitcase, and putting it in my backpack. It was still a bit overweight, but he thought that they shouldn’t complain. In the future, we are going to have to start weighing the carry-on bag as well. This is becoming an increasingly common occurrence.
Security was pretty easy. I’m just hoping that I don’t start coughing on the flight, as I packed my cough suppressant in my checked bag. I also hope my nose doesn’t run too much as I don’t have a lot of Kleenex with me. We have about an hour to kill before our first leg. I can’t wait to be back home.
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When we tried to board (We were in a fairly small jet, an E-190), they decided that my carry-on suitcase was too big, and that it needed to be checked through to Boston. I didn’t bother putting my camera back in it. The camera takes up about half of my small backpack, but I didn’t want to deal with the hassle.
The flight was no-frills. Included was water and a piece of chocolate. Everything else was for money.
The flight was only about an hour and a half to Zurich. It was strange. The ground was covered in a layer of low clouds with a well-defined top. These were very low. It looked sort of like it was water, and the mountains were islands rising out of the water, although perhaps a better analogy would be that the mountains were the mainland, and the clouds were lakes.
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My ears squealed horribly on the way up, so I was nervous about when we came down. It wasn’t my best descent, but it was far from horrible.
For some odd reason, the plane did some interesting turns before landing. I thought we were making a U-turn, but then we continued turning into a 360. Then we continued to turn, and eventually we ended up making a 720, all the while descending. I’m not sure why they did that instead of gradually descending along a direct route.
Eventually, we dropped into a sea of white. This wasn’t very thick, and when we popped out of the bottom, we were only, I’m guessing, one or two thousand feet above the ground. Within a minute or so, we were on the land. They couldn’t do that without an instrument approach.
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At the airport, we hit the rest-rooms and found some chocolate that I had bought in Zurich years ago, which we had particularly liked. There was a guy, sort of a cross between a magician and a clown making balloon animals for kids.
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We went through passport control, which seemed silly, as we weren’t leaving the airport. We then had to take a subway to concourse E. I liked the way they ran the subway. There was a clock telling how long (to the second) for the next train. At the doors, there were two lines with an area between them. Arrows indicated that people waiting to get on should wait outside of the lines, so that there was a clear space between the lines for people to exit the subway.
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We happened to be at the very end of the subway, and I found the drive mechanism interesting. Rather than supplying power to the cars, and having the cars move themselves, they have a cable loop that the subway cars are attached to, sort of like a cable car or funicular, and one motor moves the cable which moves all of the subways cars on that line in unison.
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This should be at interesting flight home to Boston. We are in a A330, which is a 2-4-2 configuration, and we have two of the middle seats. What joy... The flight is about 8 hours long, so we will have plenty of time seeing what sardines feel like.
Unfortunately, all of our strange charging cables are in the carry-on bags that were checked. So Amy can’t charge her phone, as we would need a USB A to C cable, and that is now in the luggage hold.
We got to the gate none too early. I’m not sure if they were starting to board the early groups when we got there, or whether they started at about the same time that we sat down.
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The flight to Boston was not too uncomfortable, given that we were in the center. We got decent food: a snack, dinner, and then some quiche with some ice cream.
When we got to Boston, we actually got through passport control pretty quickly, and our luggage was quick as well. Our shared van was pretty full.
We got home in the mid-afternoon, feeling rather tired. The previous night, we had only gotten 5-6 hours of sleep, and we had then been up for about 20 hours. I did a quick mini-grocery trip, we ate a little chicken, and then hit the sack early.
Amy picked up a cold either at the end of the cruise or in the airports along the way. It wasn’t Covid, but it was a worse cold than I got.
The recent low had been 31 degrees. There was a little tomato damage, but not too much. As one might expect, there were tons of tomatoes to harvest.