Nathaniel was a little troubled during take-off. This had nothing to do with air-preasure or anything…it was just the fact that I had to hold him tight to myself with his head looking over my shoulder. You see, he had plans of cruising the aisles on a grand adventure. However, airline rules, and general safety sense got in the way of that plane. He calmed down pretty much once we left the ground, which was a relief for my own ears, never mind the rest of the passengers. Once we reached a pleasing height for the captain, the seatbelt lights went dim and I was able to sit the little guy into the seat beside me. We had previously changed him into his pajamas in the airport, so we just stuck him in his little European style sleeping bag, gave him some juice and prayed for the antihystimines and children’s gravol we provided him as a complimentary parenting service to do their magic trick. Poof, 10 minutes later he was asleep, and slept the entire 7 hour flight. Ah, the wonders of modern medicine.
Flying over the Atlantic was pretty much an interest free flight….though that’s kind of what you want when flying 5000+ miles, so we didn’t complain in the slightest. Anybody who wants an exciting flight hasn’t watched the news in the last 30 years, or Lost for that matter. A couple small pockets of turbulence were hit, but the only result of that was a seatbelt light coming on, with ever-redundant no-smoking light blaring alongside. Food provided for dinner was good, added by the fact alcohol was part of the package. A couple plastic cups of red wine were consumed post haste (it’s economy, alright?). In flight movies were ‘The Queen’ with Helen Mirren, which I did watch, followed shortly by Moonstruck, ironically (or not) at the time everybody would like to be going to sleep. I did catch a few minutes when it occured to me this featured a younger Nicholas Cage, though slept through a good portion. Sorry Mr. Jewison, not my favourite of your movies.
I wonder what they would have said if I asked if they had Snakes on a Plane as an inflight?
Other than my Cher induced catnap, I didn’t get much sleep on the flight. Nathaniel has this thing about rolling around in his sleep, so either Melanie or I had to be there to catch him when he rolled off the seat. Frankly, I have the stronger endurance, so I let her sleep. I spent my time listening to one of the various radio stations provided on our earsets, or reading the biography of Pink Floyd by Nick Mason that I picked up. I actually opened the laptop at one point and tried blogging, but my brain was just too tired. I figured I’d get a few minutes in Frankfurt to snooze as we had an expected layover of 3 hours. Silly, silly man.
Breakfast was served, dawn began to rear it’s head, and I realized we were over England. Surreal moment for me.
Soon enough we came to a landing at Frankfurt, and noticed right away how foggy it was outside. ‘Hope that doesn’t cause problems with our next flight’, I remember thinking to myself in a sadly precognative moment.
My thoughts of spending some stress free time browsing some stores in the terminal were not meant to be. First we spent a few minutes locating a changing station so we could get Nathaniel out of very damp clothes and into free ones, and then we went from booth to booth trying to figure out the right ones to handle our collecting flight. Soon enough it was located, and when we asked how much time we had before we should start heading there the gruff attendant said, ‘Go now, terminal is very long walk’. It was.
Finally, after seemingly travelling the surface of the planet 3 or 4 times, we found our flight number and inquired as the status. She looked sadly at us, and informed us the flight was cancelled. The weather between here and Dusseldorf was causing all kinds of havoc, and flights were so backed up that they were cancelling all non-international flights. The trains were running though, would we like to take that to Dusseldorf? Our baggage was here in Frankfurt, we could pick that up and just board a train. We had no specific issue with taking a train, however we worried about her family meeting us on the other side.
We now had an issue. While still at home, I asked asked Melanie if I should save all her family members numbers in my phone, just in case. She said no. Now, we had no numbers to call. So, Melanie had to wake her poor mother up back in Canada asking for phone numbers…and an interesting game of numbers began.
————
OK, there will have to be a part 3. I originally was just going to write the whole flight in a single paragraph, but it sort of took on a life of it’s own. In the back of my head I’d like to get this all into a book along with pictures so that Nathaniel will have something to look at later on, besides being a cool experiment for me. So if I’m a little over-descriptive sometimes…bah.
I’m working on booking writing time tomorrow. Cheers!