I said goodbye to my final rose, the third round of blooms I had enticed from the bushes outside my lounge window by pruning, something I didn’t know I could do!
We moved out of our flat in London, on the last Saturday in October and trotted off to the airport hotel to wait around for two days until our flight to Dallas, Texas.
If you know nothing about my hubs you need to know that he is a prompt person. Happily all our children have taken after him! My mother spent her married life waiting around for my father who could only be on time for the office.
Traveling with hubs is at once exciting and stressful and I’ve told him this! I have never missed a plane; I’ve been long distance flying since I was eleven, but our methods of boarding flights differ considerably. I dutifully wait for my group or row number to be called, whereas hubs is standing up as soon as he sees a member of the ground staff approach the podium or microphone to start boarding first class. He loved it when we travelled with children, they were always an early boarding excuse. Now it’s the Ruby Membership that gets us priority access.
Hubs’ main concern is whether there will be room left in the overhead bins. I never think of that!
On this last Saturday in October Hubs was thrilled that we were safely within walking distance, almost, of the terminal where our American Airlines flight would take us merrily on our way ‘home’ via Raleigh, North Carolina in a couple of days.
We were traveling heavy preferring to hand transport the last of my parents’ estate. Finding a luggage cart for our eight bags, was impossible,
we had to commandeer one of the two lifts and man handle them to our room.
Spending two days in an hotel room at the airport has the potential of being relaxing. There is nothing else to do but snooze, read and snooze some more!
An evening of that was enough for me so on Sunday morning we made our way to mass in a taxi that charged enough to get us several hundred miles away instead of the 5 it took to get to an ancient church in Osterley,
where the King of Brunei has a house. We didn’t find it!
We had breakfast at a delightful cafe near the park,
in an expensive residential area, before returning to the hotel to hang, snooze, read and snooze some more.
At dinner downstairs we heard about a terrible storm about to break that night.
If our flight was cancelled I had nothing to dash home for…until I remembered my hairdressing appointment and my reading group scheduled for the following day. I sent directives to my film maker son on whom to contact,
“Just in case…”
The night was a quiet one in our 6th floor double glazed room.
We watched planes landing in the morning as we prepared to leave for the airport.
Hubs went downstairs to rustle up a luggage trolley, haha, and returned flustered. Our flight had been cancelled.
“Why was it cancelled?” he asked the representative for American Airlines on the phone.
“Bad storms in England!” We looked out of the window and the landing planes,
“What storms?” he enquired
Apparently the South coast had been badly buffeted and some of the planes had been cancelled, including ours, but never mind, they had booked us on another flight.
“Oh yes?” said Hubs.
It appeared we had been re-booked onto a direct flight leaving two hours later and arriving two hours earlier than we had originally been scheduled.
We caught the early shuttle and arrived at our terminal in plenty of time to answer security questions, check additional bags, pay the excess and have a leisurely breakfast.
I had to admit to Hubs that being early took the stress out of waiting in long lines, being called out to be thoroughly patted down when I beeped and having the same questions asked about who packed my bag?
The calm after the storm made our day traveling through time mercifully uneventful.
Well hello there! My name is Vivienne McNeny.
I am an empty nester exploring life as a Boomer…you could say I'm happily Boomering along!
As a homeschooling Mum I have finally quit the job of role model and mentor to my four children. I do what I want to do, eat when I feel like it, enjoy life with my blue eyed cowboy and clean my house once a month or so whether it needs it or not!
In true English form I write about the emergence of my true identity now that I can no longer hide behind my children as their Mum.
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