Europe 2012 – Day 27 – End Game

I don’t know if I missed a day in my numbering or missed double numbers in an entry that covered two days or what, but my trip was 28 days. It’s a little fishy.

I thought I was heading out early to the airport, but I had just the right timing. The lines to check my bag and then get through customs were insane. And at customs, I didn’t even get a stamp; the guy just sent me through when he saw my passport cover. Why did I have to wait there? And people were really rude, trying to cut into both lines.

I arrived at my gate on time and there was a huge crowd. We boarded late. The flight was fine. I watched three relatively new movies, all free, on Air France. Those foreign airlines really are better than the US ones, in terms of number of meals given (two), entertainment options (on a US airline, those movies would never be free), and leg room. We arrived at JFK and were not given a gate for over an hour. I was supposed to have a three hour layover, but I just barely made it on time to my connection. And it wasn’t even boarding five minutes before departure time. Then we sat on the plane for possibly another hour because other planes were in the way and we couldn’t taxi. JFK really didn’t have their act together.

I did find a pleasant surprise on the last flight: Todd Knowles and his wife were sitting next to me. We chatted a bit, but I think we were all too tired. It was late at night in France by then. They were just a few rows behind me on the previous flight too, but we didn’t know.

The airport shuttle couldn’t find my address on his GPS, and then found roads under construction from every direction going to my house. I don’t see a lot of progress in the last month around here.

And now I’m home. My weeds didn’t grow insane while I was gone; I guess it was too hot for most of them. My leaky water line was leaking much more, but the clamp had just spun around; I don’t know how it moved, but I hope it wasn’t for too long. My indoor plant was desperately thirsty, but he’s a high light plant (as opposed to high water) and is already doing better. My swamp cooler is running as well as ever. The ants were waiting for me to leave food in the kitchen. And a delivery from Winder Farms was rotting on the front stoop — it was good of them to cancel my deliveries when I asked; I’m sure there was nothing obvious about the huge bag sitting on my front stoop for the past two weeks.

So now I have a lot of work to do. Besides working on my yard and my house, I have gobs of pictures to sort through, many of them genealogy records, plenty of bills were waiting for me, my web site needs some updating to expand my business to European research trips, and I have to get back to regular work too.

Of course, there’s still more to come about this trip. With the Androids refusing to post the pictures for a while, some of those will definitely have to be shared. And I’m sure I will have lots of interesting things to share from the records, now that I’ll have the time to analyze them and add the data to my family tree.

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