Home At Last

Greetings from a grey, cold and wet Moscow. 

The trip to Dulles airport yesterday was just delightful. The fall colors were brilliant and the temperature in the low 70’s, which meant we could drive with the windows open and enjoy clean, fresh air before I hopped on the plane.  Dulles was deserted when I arrived. I walked right up to the check-in counter and was processed in minutes. No lines at security, really, no lines at all. I thought perhaps there had been a bomb scare and no one told me but I was assured it was just that I had hit things at the right time.

I had a lot of time to kill so rather than go to a lounge I walked around, which turned out to be a dumb idea.  I was wearing new shoes that I thought I had broken in, but the heel on one of them started to give me a blister. I couldn’t find any moleskin in any of the shops, so I had to improvise.  I took one of those brown things that insulates your coffee in a paper cup (I think he means a java jacket). One side is corrugated and the other smooth, so I tore it and made a little patch for my shoe, placing the corrugated side against the leather and the smooth side against my sock. Worked like a charm.

I got to the Red Carpet Club about forty-five minutes before boarding.  I expected them to give me drink coupons but they said that they now offered free standard beverages and you could pay for premium.  I went to the bar and asked if they still accepted drink coupons for premium drinks and the answer was yes, until November 1^st.  I had about twenty-five of these things that I had been saving to use when traveling with Cindy, and now I had to use them or lose them.  I started with a glass of Taittinger, which was ice cold and delicious, and now I only had twenty-three coupons. I could see I wasn’t going to make it so I started buying drinks for everyone at the bar; boy was I popular for the half hour it took to use up my coupons.

The flight was uneventful, which I suppose is the way most flights should be.  The video system on my side of the plane didn’t work so that was incentive enough for me to sleep for five of the nine hours.  We arrived twenty minutes early and I was though immigration and customs in no time.

That is where all speed records ended!  The taxi ride from the airport to the apartment took three hours and twenty minutes.  To suggest that the traffic in Moscow is horrible is an insult to the concept of horrible.  There was one part of the trip where it took us fifteen minutes to get past one building, much more stop than go.  The driver was a young man with great English and four phones.  One he used to stay connected to some Internet site that gives you traffic alerts for Moscow.  That sounds a lot like being a weather forecaster in San Diego, a no brainer.  Two of the phones he used for conversations and the other one just sat on the dashboard.  He seemed to know his way around Moscow pretty well, until we got close to the apartment.  He missed two turns and I had to take over from there. He wasn’t sure he should trust me, but I convinced him and he was surprised that the route I chose was so fast.

Amazing how you can travel 4500 miles in nine hours and then twelve miles in three hours and twenty minutes.  Had I not had so much luggage, I could have taken the train, which would have been just about an hour and fifteen from airport to the apartment.  I’m assuming that this was the last trip I needed to make with lots of stuff.

The good news is that I don’t have to hang around the apartment as long waiting for Cindy to come home.

From CC:  Best-laid plans gone awry – he had to wait for me longer than he should have!  I got up at 5:30 to run in the dark so that I could skip my after-school exercise class and get home early.  The normal 20-minute drive home took me an hour and 10 minutes!  It wasn’t raining and there was absolutely no visible cause for the backup, but we just crawled for miles.  I called Wm when I was getting close to tell him why I was late and to say that I could really relate to his day.  Not a way we particularly wanted to relate, however!  The good news (for me) was that I had offered Erica, a charming young French teacher from Bordeaux, a ride home so I had someone to talk to.  She was probably wishing she’d taken her usual bus/ metro combo instead, but she seemed content chatting with me.