Three days, four countries, six airports -- the details

[ellarien]

I left Sinaia at 9am on Sunday, and got to Sheffield-home about 15 hours later, after an hour and a half of road trip, a couple of hours in the Bucharest airport, then a two-and-a-half hour to Dusseldorf. I spent a couple of slightly fraught hours there, waiting in a melee to go through passport control and then looking in vain for my suitcase and waiting in line at the lost luggage (sorry, 'Baggage tracking') office to be told it had been checked through to London. Then an hour and a half flying to London, much wheeling of a balky luggage trolley around the tunnels under Heathrow, a train, a taxi, another train and another taxi. The train from London to Sheffield was a nice new one with laptop powersockets, which helped -- I watched a DVD and listened to music while looking over my photos. Got home, talked to my mother for half an hour or so, collapsed into bed about 11.30.

Got up at 9, showered, dressed, packed, took photos of toadstools in the garden, had lunch, packed some more, said goodbyes, got taxi to Sheffield station, train to Manchester airport(another nice new train with laptop outlets), taxi to a hotel which turned out to be brand new and shiny but very low on frills -- bed, one chair, built-in desk and doorless wardrobe and nothing else in the room but a TV and a kettle and an expanse of empty carpet that would have been about the right size for a table and armchair. No, no phone either. Slept brokenly, but better than I did at the Heathrow hotel, then caught the 7am shuttle to airport. The driver told us he'd already been stopped by security once that morning.

There was a long check-in line, with the usual third degree about my electronic items, but not so much for security. (And no, they hadn't relaxed the one-small-bag rule.) They were just introducing a new computer system, so things were a bit slow and involved much consultation between the clerks. I spend enough of my own working life waiting for computers to have a fair amount of patience for that kind of thing.

There's a severe lack of bookstores in the departure lounge at Manchester's T3; just a WHSmith. They did have a small stack of Embers of Heaven, which I already had, but nothing else I fancied. The flight boards have a new feature -- an indication of how long until the gate opens -- which looked helpful, except that my flight got stuck at 'Gate opening in 5 minutes' for well over half an hour. Eventually I wandered along to the gate
anyway, and after a while they got around to boarding. And then we sat by the runway for an hour and a half waiting for TSA clearance, and then they closed the runway and we had to move, and then we sat some more. Eventually we got airborne -- only to spend an extra half-hour or more in a holding pattern over cloudy Chicago on the way in. I ran out of book halfway across, and did a lot of Sudoku, including the 'diabolical' one in the inflight magazine.

Finally landed, walked what felt like about half a mile through underground hallways, had a nice chat about the Sun with the immigration guy, picked up my suitcase and poster tube, was waved through customs, dropped off the suitcase again but hung onto the poster tube, and made my way over to T3. There I sat down in a corner to sort myself out for security and left the poster tube leaning against the wall. By the time I got back to it a couple of
security guys were already examining it, but they let me reclaim it without any unpleasantness. Through security at T3, I fortified myself with Starbucks, laid in a couple of volumes of Brust, and wandered the terminal until I spotted a mention of my flight. 7.15, now 8.30. But at least there was a gate number, so I had somewhere to sit, if not an outlet.

Then they changed the gate. And changed it again. The final one did have a power outlet, and I watched an episode of B5. When we finally boarded, it turned out that my seat was right at the back, with an engine outside the window, but I had the whole row to myself. I spent most of the flight horizontal, if not actually asleep, which was nice. The captain was a chatty sort, and explained that the delay was in part due to a burst packet of cream of wheat in the hold on an earlier leg.

I spent most of the shuttle ride from the airport educating the driver and other passengers about the Sun and helioseismology. One doesn't normally expect to be put on the spot about the helium/hydrogen ratio under those circumstances, but my ballpark figure of 25% was good enough, it turned out.

The apartment seems to be in good shape. The cable TV isn't working -- it tends not to be when I come back after a long absence with the set-top turned off -- but I hope it will fix itself by tonight.