Winter Wonderland

A quick update from the other side of the world.  After a long, long trip home consisting of 3 roughly 8 hour flights it's been great to settle back into the cold and snowy Midwest.  My journey home was fairly uneventful, I managed to score a row of 3 empty seats for my Dubai-London leg, which I paid for dearly when I got stuck next to a woman who was 7 months pregnant and travelling with an 18 month-old for the London-Chicago leg.

Compared to Ian however, I got off easy.  This is what happened at Heathrow a week later:

Seriously, that's a jumbo-jet they are trying to dig out.

So yes, I lost dear Ian for two whole days.  He was in the air when they closed Heathrow and I later found that he had been diverted to Paris. He slept at the airport and then Emirates tried to send him back to Dubai!  Refusing, he bailed and queued for 6 hours at Gare du Nord in hopes of getting onto the Eurostar.  After a six hour wait, in which thousands of people (some even ticket holders) were turned away and the French army (who later surrendered to the passengers) came in to sort everyone out - Ian made it on the very last train that was not fully booked until Boxing Day.  It took him 58 hours to get home.  When I asked him if he felt a bit like Odysseus, he replied, 'yes, only more heroic.'

So here's to hoping that return journey is kinder to us both.  I've got just under a week left in the USA and then have just under a week UK before returning tropics where I can resume my regimen of swimming and food poisioning and shed this layer of winter fat that I've accumulated since arriving.