Today we woke for the last time in Greece, for we had to go home. I was pretty ready to go home, I felt I had come, seen and conquered. We finished packing and went down for breakfast, but I didn’t want to eat anything because I didn’t want to immediately need to use the bathroom on the plane, which I was sure was going to be the case if I did. So I didn’t.

We waited a while for the bus and there were a few decoys that got our hopes up, but finally we found the bus and made it to the airport. There was no shuttle bus this time, but we ended up underground in huge hallways with, thankfully, moving sidewalks. It was quite epic getting across to our gate, but we arrived and began our next phase of waiting.

Alicia went to get a coffee and apparently bought the last one since the woman who went after her paid for a coffee and no cup fell into place and the coffee just poured down the drain. Alicia would later wish that their positions were reversed, as the coffee just tasted of chemicals. Eventually they announced initial boarding of the plane by a series of row numbers of which we were not part, and then the next call a few minutes later was just “everyone else can board”, so it was a bit of a mad dash.

We didn’t initially arrive in particularly good time at the check-in so the lady said she couldn’t give us our preferred seats, but said she would try to leave a gap in case the plane didn’t fill up. In the end, the plane did mostly fill up, but the gap she left was completely useless. This plane, at the section we were in, had 3 sets of 3 seats. Alicia was in the left seat of the middle section, Laura was in the right seat of the middle section, and they put me in the left seat of the right section, and rather unfortunately there was a married couple assigned to the two seats to my right. Being the fatass that I am, I didn’t want to be in that seat and be the fuel of someone’s story about how they had to sit next to this fat guy and all the usual crap. Laura agreed to move over to the middle seat next to Alicia and I sat in her seat.

Unfortunately, this was pretty cramped, and I was in pain for the next 10 hours. At least there were mostly decent movies, they showed the new Hulk movie, Iron Man, Swing Vote, and The Golden Compass. The first one was meh, the second one I liked (except for the fact that the basic plot of the two are virtually identical), the third was amusing at times but overall not very engaging, but the fourth one was complete crap in my opinion.

They served a meal eventually of another President’s Choice chicken thing, which was pretty good, and later a snack of a sandwich, and having not eaten much in the previous days, were eaten right up. I also had a drink at each opportunity, which were fairly frequent. And my capacious bladder sustained me such that I didn’t need to use the bathroom on the plane. But it was amusing to watch the girls, who had to go frequently. There were a couple of turbulence warnings where we had to sit down again, and as soon as they went off half the plane lunged for the bathrooms.

Also at some point during the flight an announcement came over the tannoy asking if there was a doctor on the plane, which is the sort of thing you expect to see in movies. And when we finally landed, we had to wait for paramedics to remove the person, and never really did hear what had happened. Another odd bit was that when we left the plane, and before reaching any of the regular airport checkpoints, police were waiting to see our passports. We even showed them to a collection of other people since we weren’t sure who we should show them to initially.

We went through the declarations area with our forms, which were far simpler than Alicia had prepared us for. Alicia recalled a form where we had to list all items and prices and amounts (in the case of alcohol) that was fairly rigorous. The form we ended up having to fill out and present was basically, did you bring back more than $750 worth of stuff.

Baggage Claim was a bit chaotic since they dumped two flight’s worth of bags in the one carosel, and there were few openings in the throngs of people. Alicia and I managed to claim our bags quickly, but it took a long time for Laura’s to appear. We finally escaped and met up with Murad, who had been waiting for us quite a long while.

Murad drove me home first, which I greatly appreciated as I was reasonably jetlagged, and I made it back to my apartment. It was a strange sensation, it was of course very familiar, but slightly not, as well. It was weird being home again, and it had only been two weeks. I ordered and ate a pepperoni pizza (sorry Alicia) as my Thanksgiving dinner, spoke to parents and brother on the phone, lasted until around 9pm, and unexpectedly fell asleep with the lights on.

The places we went, don’t know the course the ships took so straight lines it is

Not To Be Continued