Monday: July 14
Barcelona to Boston, Not as Painful as We Expected
I slept well last night. I didn’t have too much trouble falling asleep. Perhaps it was the wine at dinner.
Getting up at 4am was not as painful as I expected. We had scheduled room service for 4:15, and it was only slightly late. It gave me a better breakfast than I had been expecting. We got to the Star theater only a minute or two late. We were in group Green 4, which brought to my mind the code names for the beaches in the invasion of Normandy.
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During the bus ride to the airport, the bus driver had to brake hard at one point. Some sort of chime went off, which in hindsight apparently meant something like “hold on”. We were sort of jerked forward by the stop.
At the airport, I think the theory was that porters would bring the luggage from the bus to the terminal and we would pick it up there. In the meantime, we waited on the bus. We waited longer and longer, and people were beginning to get restless. Apparently, the porters never showed up, so the driver just took the bags off the bus, then we got off, got our bags, and brought them into the terminal ourselves.
We had a somewhat sizable line at the counter. It was moving slowly because there was only one person handling the line, but around the time we were halfway through the line, two more people (for a total of three) were working the line, so it moved faster.
When we “boarded” at the gate, we just went down to a bus, which drove us to the plane. There seemed to be a lot of available jetways, so I don’t know why they parked the plane in the middle of nowhere. It was a bare bones flight: no audio/video, just water and a bar of chocolate.
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When we got to Frankfurt, we again had to take a bus to the terminal. It was raining slightly, but not too much. This was the first rain on the trip.
We got our steps in walking through the airport. During the first flight, despite my decent breakfast, I heard a lot of loud growls from my stomach. Amy was hungry as well, and we didn’t want to wait for plane food, so we got some lunch at a “Bavarian” restaurant. They were out of what I wanted, so I opted for the meatloaf. It was very strange. It resembled nothing so much as a large slice of spam. Lunch filled a lot of our layover time. Now we need to go through another level of security and then get to our gate.
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Strangely enough, we didn’t have to go through another level of security. They just checked that our faces matched our passports and the name on the boarding pass.
We are flying back on an A340. This is a fairly large Airbus, but like our cruise ship next to the other cruise ships, it looks small compared to a 747. We passed by a fair number of Lufthansa gates that had 747’s parked next to them.
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Luftansa fed us well. We watched several movies. Getting up in the middle of the night was not as painful as we expected. It was, however, a long day. We were traveling for about 18 hours, and we were awake for nearly 24 hours.
In Logan, we had a long wait for our luggage to come out.