I might have a favorite color.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, L.A. time, I called an Uber. It was 1:30 in the morning, in Abu Dhabi. Inexplicably, the vehicle that arrived to pick me up was a Toyota Tacoma. I've never had a pickup truck as an Uber before. But the driver was very nice.
I arrived at the airport and checked my duffle bag. I proceeded through security with my backpack and my rolling bag. I had a change of clothes and all our refill medications packed in the rolling bag. With all my vitamins, this amounts to quite a few bottles, as you can see:
My flight to Abu Dhabi was the same one we took several weeks ago, with the tight connection in Istanbul. I kept an anxious eye on the clock, hoping that my departure would not be delayed. Soon enough, it was time to go! I made my way to the gate, boarded, and got settled in.
Still watching the clock, I had a new worry when a young couple, with an infant, settled in across the aisle from me. The baby was so little that he wasn't yet holding up his head. I could only hope he would sleep through the flight. Ultimately, the couple swapped places with other passengers so they could sit in seats that had an attachment for a bassinet. As far as I could tell from this new location, the baby did sleep through most of the flight.
We took off a few minutes after our scheduled time. But at this point, all I could do was hope for the best. Dinner began with nuts and a small selection of appetizers:
The second course was appetizers I selected from a cart - soup, artichokes, eggplant, watermelon and cheese. The soup was really good. There were a number of other things on the cart, but I didn't want to ask for everything.
For my main, I had selected the beef option. It was dry enough that I actually smeared some of the butter from my bread plate onto it, but after the butter melted in, it was perfectly fine.
For dessert, I opted for the cheese plate, as I typically do because I'm never sure of the ingredients.
Dinner service took a long time, but I read my book and watched a couple television shows. After dinner, I went to sleep.
I slept for about four hours before waking up. I didn't feel great when I woke up, but I figured I was still fighting the touch of a stomach bug from the weekend. I drank some water and went back to sleep. When I woke up another four hours later, I knew I had a migraine.
With just over two hours left, they began serving breakfast. We had filled out cards selecting our breakfast at the beginning of the flight. Breakfast began with this fruit platter:
But after nibbling on a slice of kiwi, I knew that food wasn't going to be an option. With so little time left in the flight and a tight connection in Istanbul, I couldn't risk taking a migraine pill. Instead, I asked the flight attendant to take my tray away and I curled back up with both my sweatshirt and my blanket covering my eyes. I did fall asleep again, which is unusual for me.
During the last thirty minutes of the flight, I packed up absolutely everything I had out. Usually, I will keep my kindle and a few other things to entertain myself with during landing. But I didn't want to risk leaving anything and I knew my migraine was making things fuzzy. With the headache, I couldn't read anyway.
We landed in Istanbul just ten minutes late. This left me with an hour to make my connection. I was feeling reasonably good about this timeline. But I'd forgotten that we would not taxi to a gate, but to a bus. I got off the plane and onto the bus. At the bus gate, I got off the bus to hear a uniformed employee shouting for "Abu Dhabi passengers".
I skewed out of the crowd over to him. He told me to get back on the bus. I waited until everyone had exited and climbed back onto the bus. He got on with me. We were the only people in the bus. He said something about the Abu Dhabi gate being on the other side of the airport.
The bus drove us around to another gate. I got off, following the employee into the building. We surprised the man working at that gate; he clearly wasn't expecting anyone to enter. The employee I was following shouted something at him that included "Abu Dhabi" and we walked past.
Up two escalators and through several hallways, he deposited me at my gate. The sign was flashing "last call". There were perhaps six people waiting ahead of me to have their boarding passes scanned. Outside, a bus was completely full with another handful of people standing outside the bus. By the time my passport was checked and my boarding pass scanned, that bus had left and the few of us were boarding another bus. We waited for several minutes, but only three more passengers came after me - all of them were out of breath from running.
The bus took us out to our airplane. I boarded and found my seat. Business class on this flight was only about half full. I got a glass of water and took my migraine pill. I'd told Craig my plan. I hoped the five hour flight would be long enough that I could function again by the time I needed to go through customs.
I curled up with the sleeve of my sweatshirt pulled over my eyes. A flight attendant took my water glass and threw a blanket over me. After we took off, another flight attendant tried to show me the menu. I just shook my head at her; the migraine pill was in full effect.
She suggested I move to another seat, "away from the baby," if I wanted to sleep. I groggily agreed and she moved me back two rows, as far from the toddler on this flight as possible. As a bonus, I got two extra pillows because I'd taken the pillows from my row. I curled up and dozed through the entire flight. I can't say that I slept, because I kept starting awake and I frequently had to change position.
With about thirty-five minutes left in the flight, I finally woke up. One of the flight attendants came back and asked me if he could get me anything. I remember staring blankly at him, trying to figure out what exactly he was offering. Finally, I asked for some water so he would go away.
Getting off the plane was a bit of a challenge. Once more, I had to make my way down a set of stairs to a waiting bus. My migraine pill made the stairs even more of a challenge than the full blown migraine had done. But I managed and found my way to passport control.
I'd forgotten to ask Craig which line I was supposed to pick and I only vaguely remembered coming in last time, sick from Istanbul. Naturally, I picked the wrong line. I should have gone through e-gates, but instead went through the normal line. By the time I realized my mistake, the line for e-gates was longer than my current position in the other line.
I knew Craig was waiting for me, which did not make me any more patient. Queue management was sketchy, with security opening new lanes all the time and funneling the waiting people into those lines. It was frustrating, but I kept an eye on the e-gates line. While I'm certain I would have gotten through there quicker if I'd made that choice from the start, I'm also fairly confident that by the time I'd gone back I would have finished at about the same time.
Regardless, I still needed to get my bag. And, as it turned out, that was an even longer wait that passport control had been. I waited at the baggage carousel for over thirty minutes, until the slow trickle of bags stopped. At that point, I had to return to the baggage desk to fill out a form. I was told that my bag was still in Istanbul (no great surprise). It would come on the same flight the following day and they would deliver it to my hotel.
By now, it was 2:00 in the morning. When Craig paid for parking, we discovered that he had been at the airport for over two hours. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was 2:30, a full twenty-five hours since I left the house in Los Angeles.
The next day, my much traveled, extra tagged bag arrived at our hotel:
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