Twenty-Two Hours

Although I've been through a lot worse, I've got to say that our Scotland trip started off a bit shaky.
We were at the airport in plenty of time. We got our Starbucks. We were sitting there quietly at our gate, reading our books and minding our own business, when those two dreaded words popped up on the reader board at gate B15 - Flight delayed. The Hispanic lady sitting behind the counter told us (in a pretty mangled form of English, in my opinion) that it was just a minor maitenance problem and that everyone would have enough time to make their connections, but the three of us were starting to get a little antsy. We had a two hour layover in Newark, but was that enough?
"We'll have plenty of time," I said this to assure Grandma, but really it was more for myself. "In-" I stopped to look at the clock. "twenty-two hours, we'll be in Edinburgh." (Because of the eight hour time difference, we would leave Seattle at noon and arrive in Scotland at ten a.m. the next day)
But when the lady announced that the plane would be delayed an hour, I begin to doubt the words coming out of my own mouth. Wanting something to complain about, I slammed my book shut and thought grumpily that the lady should talk so other people could understand her.
In the end, the flight was only delayed by a half hour. It was a pretty uneventful journey, except for a major first for me: for the very first time ever, I cracked down and used the airplane bathroom. Every other time I've flown I've been able to wait until we landed, but that day I drank a smoothie, half a bottle of water, and two glasses of Mr. Pibb in a two-hour period. I sat in my seat until I thought I was going to explode, and then I burst down the aisle toward the back of the plane before anyone could steal my bathroom.
As we were about to land in Newark, the pilot came on with another dreaded announcement that went along the lines of, "The fog conditions are too severe for us to land, so we have to fly around for about twenty minutes until it clears up. Sorry if you have a connection."
It was like the universe was doing everything possible to keep us from making our connection.
Ten minutes passed, and just as Grandma was beginning to panic a little, the pilot announced that we could descend. Grandma and I were then immersed in a conversation about exactly how long it would take to get to the gate. By the time we got of the plane, it was 9:30 p.m. Our connecting flight left at 10:15. Could we make it?
Well, I guess the universe changed its mind and wanted us to make it to Edinburgh after all, because our connecting flight was delayed by an hour because of the fog. Relieved, we set off in search of food, since we hadn't eaten since one. Along the way, we passed a mass exodus of Asian kids shuffling from Security to the Boston gate, chattering away in a language none of us could understand. What really mesmerized us was that as soon as we thought that the last one had passed us, more kept coming! It was like every child over the age of ten had come over from Asia and taken over the Newark airport.
"There's another one of those Chinese kids," Grandma murmured to me.
"How do you know they're Chinese?" I asked. "They could be Japanese, or Vietnamese, or South Korean, or North Korean, or Tibetan, or..."
Finally, finally, finally, eleven hours after we boarded our final flight, I was looking out the window at the lush green meadows and forests that made up Scotland. It wasn't until then that it dawned on me...I was really in Europe! I had finally left North America, the continent that I had spent every moment of the last thirteen years on, and I was in a completley new place! It was both exciting and scary at the same time.
You might think that today ended with the three of us going to the hotel and sleeping off our jet lag, but that's not at all how things went. But to keep this from being the longest blog post ever (it already might be) I put the second part of today in a different post. So read on!
Love,
Kiera