72 hours later I’m home!
The flights from both Johannesburg to Qatar, and Qatar to New York were both actually pretty painless. Decent food, and an awesome selection of movies and music. I saw fantastic mr. Fox which was really good. I also executed my ” operation 13 hour layover in Qatar” plan perfectly.
Phase 1: Saturday night, Steph and I went out with some friends in Jo’burg leading to a slight lack of sleep. Just slight enough to eventually make me tired, but not too much lacking, which would have made me not functional at 100% to execute the rest of the plan.
Phase 2: watch alot of movies, and refrain from sleeping. This of course meant I had to avoid the gigantic selection of Sandra Bullock movies Qatar airways boasts.
Phase 3: allow myself only to indulge in Qatar Airways wine selection after half of the flight had been completed, causing drowsiness to set in, of course, at a later time.
Phase 4: after arriving in Qatar, I kept myself as occupied as I could, combing through duty free, brushing my teeth, small talk, etc, until the drowsiness had accumulated into a blur of debilitation.
Phase 5: This phase took some training over the previous 5 months. The training included practicing sleeping on hard surfaces, and in front of many strangers. It also required a sleeping bag, which I had strategically purchased back in December.
Phase 6 was simple. I had pocketed the complementary sleep mask from the reception desk to the executive lounge (which denied my entrance, but were none the wiser of my crafty thievery). The second half of phase 6 was to inflate the inflatable pillow I purchased a month back in Namibia.
Phase 7: with shoes off, I got into my sleeping back, applied sleep mask, and Ipod headphones with nice music ideal for sleep.
Phase 8: this phase was not executed, because I had already fallen asleep.
I managed an impressive 7 hours of sleep, waking up with just enough time to brush my teeth, and board the aircraft.
This next flight was much longer, but followed roughly the same game plan.
I arrived in New york with 3 or 4 hours until i could check in for my next flight to montreal. It’s important that I mention the state of chaos that was JFK airport on monday night. The JFK airport was in a state of chaos on monday night. there was something like 6 airplanes waiting to be boarded at the same gate as mine. when I go to the gate to board, they tell me there is a problem with my ticket, and that I had to go to the desk over accross the terminal to fix it ( same problem arose in Johannesburg, so i was not worried) The desk which fixed my ticket problem has one of those screens to tell you about which flight are boarding, and it said Montreal Trudeau – boarding. Even after i fixed the ticket issue, it still read boarding, so i walked back to the gate. When I got there, it still said boarding, but the man told me it was locked up and that I had missed the flight. This sucked.
Long story short, I was put on for a flight to Detroit connecting to Ottawa. I remembered that there was an Ottawa in kansas, and made sure I wasn’t on that flight. i was on that flight. Second long story short, I was put through to Canada, but my flight to detroit didn’t leave until the next morning, at 8:30.
This meant that I had to repeat Phases 4 through 8 once more. Anyways, I’m getting tired of writing about this experience. I made it home yesterday around 4:30. It’s nice to be home. Very strange waking up in my own bed today.
