The Journey

My troubles from the journey started immediately after my last blogpost. I had 2 more hours on the shuttle before I was to reach the Portland Airport - so I thought plenty of time to find a hotel room. However - that was not to be the case. Call after call, I came up blank - no vacancy. I finally found a hotel room - $120 for the night, no shuttle to the airport and a 6 mile taxi ride. It sounded do-able. I made one more call - found a room for $200 with a shuttle, and decided to keep my prior booking to save money.

Turns out that may not have been the best decision... It cost $60 round trip for the taxi ride (though it was quite fast and I didn't have to wait around for it, so that was good), and the hotel I stayed in was booking out rooms that had maintenance problems because people were desperate for rooms! I ended up with a room that didn't lock from the outside - so I could bolt it from inside, but not leave my stuff inside securely. Not a big deal - I was only there to sleep.

Apparently there were no rooms left in Portland by the time I got there, and people were paying full price for rooms where the shower didn't work! I've never seen anything like it. I was happy to get my 5 hours of sleep, though a bit shocked that I was paying $180 to get it!

I'm sure the sleep was worth it - I woke up reasonably refreshed, did my morning exercises and felt pretty good for my 5+ hour flight from Portland to NYC. The landing in NYC was rough - lots of turbulence. People were not dealing well with it - and I was very glad to be back on the ground. I had to call my parents, and grab some food, and find lunch, and make it to my far away gate for the flight to Cape Town - with little time to spare since my previous flight landed a bit late. I barely managed! Fortunately a bunch of people did not manage (many flights were late due to the storms), and the back of the plane was nearly empty. I had two seats to myself, which was a welcome relief since it's a bit easier to sleep on an overnight flight when you can stretch out a bit.

Unfortunately the relief didn't last long, as we ended up sitting on the runway for 3 hours. Our 18 hour flight, was now extended to 21... I have never spent that long on a single airplane before! We refueled after 8 hours in Senegal, but we were not allowed off the plane. I had not anticipated that. It was a very long haul... Senegal looked like I would have imagined it would with concrete block housing, and lots of brown dirt. I was surprised how much coast the town had (it juts out a bit into the ocean) as well as how flat it was. I could see a range from shacks to middle-class housing, to beautiful ocean-side villas. I wondered what place my sister stayed, and where she had gone while there.

(COMMENTS ADDED BY MY SISTER: in Senegal I was in a small house, very comfortable, but the gardener lived in the garage and the cleaner/cook came and went each day. beautiful garden. colorful clothes as well. ocean nice, flat, flat all around. saw plenty of the corregated tin shacks, and diversity of living.)

We had to sit on the plane while they did a safety check, which included removing the seat cushions and looking under all the seats - I had never seen under them before, so that was kind of fun to watch - though it seemed an inefficient process! The best part of the plane "refreshing" was the literal refreshing - someone came through and sprayed liberal amounts of air freshener!! It is needed after a few hundred people sleep in a small confined space!! I felt pretty yucky by then. It was another 9 hours to Cape Town from there - a fairly uneventful flight, and mostly over the ocean, so not much to see.

Our arrival into cape town was amazing - a totally clear day, we could see all of cape point, table mountain, the further mountains that I know are near the wine region, all the beach-side towns, and the harbor. I could make out the places I had been before, and it was a welcome sight to be coming to a city I had come to know and love.