Griffin is sitting in front of me on our flight to Atlanta. I can see Bennett one row up and off to starboard. The girls sit together on the same side three rows behind me. The seating is unideal, but at least we are on the plane. We left late this morning, circumstances I want to attribute to Rowan's last minute orthodontist appointment, but there was also the usual mayhem of me making a bunch of last minute preparations to leave the house for a week - less so this time though since Serge will be there and Ann will come to hang out with the cats. Also, I spent a few tense minutes looking for the hat I wanted to wear, Bennett and I missed the turn-off to Pike's Peak shuttle parking, and Griffin had to be stopped by the TSA to have his can of instant pink lemonade tested for explosives.
"The electronic fuel service record broke." That's what the pilot said. This process for ensuring that our plane is adequately fueled had somehow failed, and now we needed to revert to a paper process to record the necessary details. That's annoying, I thought, but how long could it possibly take to fix the situation. On that point, the pilot and crew were vague, but as it turns out, about three hours. Three hours sitting in a metal tube with a couple hundred of your closest friends. Babies cried, adults complained, everyone steamed and sweltered.
As suggested, I rebooked our flight from Atlanta to Savannah, and we just made it to Atlanta in time to catch that later flight. We were descending into Savannah at around 8:30 pm, me looking out the window again mesmerized by the shapes that humans make upon the Earth, an endlessy fascinating geometrical hodgepodge only perceivable from the air.
