After a very long journey home, I'm back in the US for some time.
Flights are expensive now, and I tried to find the cheapest flight that I could... which ended up taking nearly four days over five flights going through four different countries.
I left Bangkok at 4am, flying on a pleasant overnight flight to Muskat, Oman. I had to stay in the airport for ten hours. In hindsight, I wish I could have gone out to see a bit of the country, but I was worried about money, which is a bit tight at the moment.
Instead, I took walks through the terminals, enjoyed a great hummus wrap, and settled down in a comfy waiting area to pass the time with podcasts.
(May I recommend Attempt Adventure?)
A short flight later brought me into Dubai, UAE late at night. I cleared customs to the sound of Muslim prayers being played over the loudspeaker, grabbed my bag, and took a taxi into the city.
Dubai surprised me. I was expecting a big, chaotic, expensive metropolis. I suppose parts of it certainly are, but the city itself is actually fairly small - around 3 million people - and the taxi into town was surprisingly affordable. I had a fantastic conversation with my Sri Lankan driver, and the fifteen-minute drive to my hotel flew by.
I spent two nights in Dubai, which really helped me fight off the jet lag. Actually, breaking up the trip into two parts like this made it much more manageable than it might have been.
Two days later, I flew out of Dubai to Amman, Jordan (which took about an hour), and after a one-hour layover which saw me rushing through the airport without time to fill up my water bottle, I had finally settled down for my long flight back to the US. Everything was going great! All of the flights were perfectly on time, and many of them had even been arriving early. Everyone was so polite and helpful...
And then I arrived in the USA to pure chaos! It turned out that my flight had been delayed five hours. The staff ushered me and all of the other passengers to a transfer counter where the woman working the desk told me that she would try to put me on a flight departing in about 25 minutes! I ran!
Luckily, there was hardly any line at security! I had to take the airport monorail to a totally different terminal, arriving at the gate just as they were boarding...
...only to find that I was one of thirty people who had been placed on standby on this flight. There was never a chance! I don't even know why they bothered trying to put us all on standby. In the end, only two people from the standby list got to get on the plane.
It was going to be another long layover. I bought an overpriced club sandwich ($18!) and found a comfortable place to sit to wait out the layover in the quiet terminal.
I finally made it to Dallas. In the end, everything went fine, I suppose. My good buddy James picked me up at DFW around midnight. There was a little trouble with my bag - for some reason they had re-booked the bag on the standby flight that I was not on - and I had to scramble around the airport looking for anyone who could help me locate it.
Then, it was time for the road trip. Now that my parents live a good two hours from the airport, it's a lot harder getting to and from their house, but eventually we did (despite the rainstorm we had to drive through on the dark road), arriving around 2am.
It had been a long, long journey... but I'm so glad to be back home for some time! It's so nice to be back with all of those crazy flights behind me!
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