12/24/16,
“The Long Haul”
Aboard QF
94, En route LAX-MEL
When I get
off the plane at Melbourne, it will be close to 6 PM back in New York, almost
exactly 24 hours after I got on the plane last night. Other than my brief sprint between my gates
at LAX, those 24 hours will have been spent entirely on airplanes. I have had 24-hour journeys before, but, in
the past, a large bulk of the time has been taken up by layovers at airports,
not the 5-minute sprint that constituted my layover last night. Most people would consider a 6-hour flight to
be a long flight, but, I do not, especially not when it is being immediately
followed by a 16-hour flight. There has
been a sharp contrast between these two flights, with this flight far exceeding
in comfort the shorter flight.
After I
closed last night, I went in search of food and drink. I found a fridge that had the new Glaceau
Sparkling Smartwater that I had wanted to try, and I cracked one open and
started drinking it by the time I got to the cash register. If I had known how gouged the price was, I
would not have bought it, but it was too late.
I then went to Auntie Ann’s for some pretzel products. There were no seats, but I found some spots
at the counter.
As I ate, I learned some
devastating news. Carrie Fisher had
suffered a heart attack. Details were
sparse, and it was unclear how serious it was.
I then saw that she had stopped breathing on a flight and was not
responding to CPR when she landed. No,
this couldn’t be. Nothing else mattered
at this point. There have been a lot of
awful celebrity deaths this year, but none of them hit me as heard as Carrie
was, even though her status was unclear.
I soon saw that she had been resuscitated and was on a ventilator at the
ICU. It looked like she would make
it. Our flight had been delayed due to a
late arrival of the inbound aircraft. No
matter, they had told me that they hold the LAX-MEL flight to wait for the
JFK-LAX passengers.
It was a completely
packed flight, and I was seated behind an annoying kid who kept putting his
seat up and down, which meant I had to keep adjusting the angle of my monitor
screen on the back of his seat. To make
matters worse, since I was in one of the last rows, and the flight attendants
were, I believe, on their last shift of the day, I got the short end of the
stick, and one of them was particularly unpleasant to me. The movie options were in-flight
entertainment were plentiful, and I opted on a Western from about 10 years ago
that I never saw. It was called “3:10 To
Yuma” with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe playing the leads. It was a standard Western, but it was really
good.
For dinner, I had plain grilled
chicken and Australian red wine, followed by a chocolate raspberry
dessert. Coffee was supposed to follow but
they stopped the beverage service a few rows before mine for some reason. I had to specially request the coffee from a
different flight attendant. I then took
my nap, and I was woken up by a PA announcement that we were being kept in a
holding pattern and would need to circle for half an hour before landing. They said it would not affect our
connections, since all flights at LAX were grounded, due to the storm. Now I started to worry. Would we be able to take off from LAX? The storm was brutal, there was terrible
turbulence as we made our descent, and the runway was flooded, but, I figured,
if we could land, we could take off.
As
soon as I got off the plane at LAX, I heard on the PA there, “Final boarding call
for Qantas Flight 94 to Melbourne. Please
proceed to Gate 152 for immediate boarding.” We (me and the other JFK-LAX-MEL passengers) sprinted to that gate, but
we made it. The flight was almost empty,
and in my four-seater, the two middle seats were empty, so I, um, it’s better
to use numbers. The four-seater was
DEFG, and I had seat G. Someone was in
seat D, but EF were empty. I moved to
seat F, and the guy in D didn’t seem to mind me using half of E for extra elbow
and legroom. I was quite
comfortable.
I decided to watch “The
Queen” for my movie, an exceptional biopic for which Helen Mirren won the Oscar
playing Queen Elizabeth. More
importantly, it was the only Best Picture nominee from 2006 that I had not
seen. Until this point, I had always
said that the Academy got it right in awarding “The Departed” the honor that
year. I can no longer say that. “The Queen” was just perfect on every
level. A+ acting performances,
especially by Mirren, great costuming and hair and makeup, production design,
enthralling screenplay, fitting score, even the sound mixing was good,
something you don’t expect for a drama.
I loved every minute of it.
Towards the end, they brought dinner, and I got tortellini, along with
sparkling Australian wine. It was quite
good. After the movie, I had a bit of a
dilemma. It was about 1 AM in Los
Angeles, and, given that I had not slept yet, it would still be considered a
12/23/16 entry if I wrote, even though it would be after midnight. My watch said 8 PM Australian time (on
12/24/16), and, if I took a nap, I would wake up after midnight, and I would
have to use 12/25/16 for my dateline. I
really wanted to make sure I had an entry with a 12/24/16 dateline. What to do?
Well, there was only one possibility.
I would need to take a nap and wake up within 4 hours, before
midnight. I did just that, not setting
an alarm. When I woke up, my watch read
11:59 PM, 12/24/16. Perfect timing. I retrieved my laptop from the overheard and
sat back down in my seat, where I proceeded to write this entry, which I will
now close so that I can try to sleep some more before landing in Melbourne.
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