Living in America

We’re back! Well, we are back in the US for a few weeks over Christmas, anyway.

We hauled four large suitcases all the way from Paris and we got three of them at the other end. I have no idea how they can lose one suitcase from a group. It was the only red one we had, so maybe it went on a special luggage cart for red suitcases and got sent to Malaga. Of course, it had my underwear, shaving kit, pants, allergy pills, etc. Since we drove immediately to Bob & Tiffany’s I don’t think it will catch up with us as quickly.

The flight was all right, except for the complete lack of ventilation control. I don’t like this trend of removing the little individually controlled air-flow nozzles. It got really warm where we were sitting. Sarah was a little over-exuberant a few times, but she was good considering it was a seven hour flight. I think she is used to flying at this point. This was her eighth plane trip this year.

Security had a new surprise for us! We were cutting it close to catching the plane, so they had to slow us down somehow. We had just rolled our eyes at the newbie in front of us, who didn’t take his laptop out of the bag and still had his belt and watch on. We stepped up, shoeless, beltless, with the Macbook pro in it’s own tray when the guy asked about laptops. I smugly pointed to the naked Mac in its tray and started to move to the metal detector when he asked if I had any cables in the bag. Wha…? “Oui, bien sûr! J’ai beaucoup des cables!”

Please take them out.

What? You have to be s******g me! (I did not say out loud).

And any other electronics?

So there I am, unloading power adapters, phones & chargers, extra batteries, USB cables, PDAs, iPods (why do I have all of this CRAP!) into a tray while looking at the clock and thinking, “I do not want to miss ANOTHER flight!”.

But everything else was relatively painless. Our car was waiting at the Hertz plaza WITH the child seat I had only added the day before. It wasn’t installed, but it and the car had LATCH, so that was painless. I went to get my GPS out of my bag when I discovered the mess.

Sarah had handed me the (allegedly) empty smoothie container (a juice box-like thing). At the time, we were waiting in line or something, so no trash can was readily available and I just stuck it in my bag, carefully making sure it was upright and wouldn’t move. Well, it probably got upended in the security bag-emptying frenzy and proceeded to empty itself during the flight. It was all over the inside of the bag. My two old cellphones that I brought to use in the US seemed to get the worst of it along with the Macbook’s power adapter. I spent a good twenty minutes cleaning them this morning.

I stopped in DC and got a diet Dr. Pepper. It was freaking fantastic!