isoglossia

We arrived home on Sunday afternoon following 19 hours of vexing, sleepless travel. Not entirely sleepless: Adam logged a fair number of hours in his bulkhead baby basket (photo below, if for no other reason than to appease my sister), and I did doze off just minutes into “Madagascar” (much to Magda’s disgust — she laughed like a drain all the way through it). I didn’t sleep for long, as all of sudden we’d caught up with morning and they were flinging coffee at us. Then I did sleep for half of the hop from Paris to Ljubljana. The seat on that little plane felt as though it was constructed entirely of jousting equipment, however, so the sleep was the unwelcome kind in which you dream you’re being tortured by being made to sleep in a seat made out of jousting equipment. It was counterproductive sleeping and the travel overall was much more vexing than when we flew in the other direction three weeks ago. Adam was in a spaz-oleum, uncontrollable-Po mood during every moment that he was not asleep, and our layover at Charles de Gaulle was the second most annoying layover I’ve ever experienced, lightened only by a bomb scare near our departure gate. It’s clear to me that Mother Theresa never flew through CDG, because if she had she never would’ve been able to continue helping all of those fucking people. We arrived home grateful and drained and with a baby whose sleep patterns are unpredictable even when his biological clock is not jet-lagged six hours off.

It’s hard to write a “we’re back” post without descending into clichés, so I’ll just go ahead and let them flow. First of all, there’s the obligatory bitch-about-air-travel part, which I’ve pretty well covered, so now I’ll move on to the predictable photo-with-piece-of-wing:


A beautiful clear evening to take off over Boston Harbor. The view didn’t suck. That dachshund-shaped thing is Lovell Island, with Georges Island and Fort Warren in the lower right. A few minutes later we could see all of the islands of Casco Bay and the city of Portland, and then, as the Air France people waved food at us, a cool, gradient-rich sunset over Newfoundland:

We were happy to have the little p&s/p.o.s. Canon with us, having trusted the Pentax to the baggage-handling surrender-monkeys. In fact, on this trip we managed to fill up both cameras for a total of over a gigabyte of pictures, including a few entries for our new favorite group on Flickr, Stick Figures In Peril, which we’ll be posting soon.

The summer weather during almost our entire stay in New England was wonderful. Arriving back in Slovenia, it appears that we didn’t miss much, and it was gray and drizzly at Brnik airport when we touched down. We finally reached our apartment after enduring 19 hours, seven diaper changes, six security checkpoints, three meals, three cars, three buses, two airplanes, one bomb scare and one baby. We smelled like a large herd of goats, turned the water heater back on and waited. Next time I travel by air I promise myself and everyone else concerned that I will make sure I have enough antiperspirant for BOTH pits.

Two days later, Adam appears to be more or less approximately back on European time, sort of. Below he’s getting ready for bed in his bulkhead baby bassinet, which one of my sisters would NOT stop pestering me about, so here is what it looked like, bolted into the bulkhead in front of row 33, port side:

The typical “we’re going on vacation” post was here.