Blogging at 33,000 feet

Any normal person would be asleep right now. In fact as I look around, most people ARE asleep right now, but I’m not so sure they’re normal. This cloth covered seat is killing my ass, and the combination of a venti triple-mocha from Starbucks (a 3 shot espresso for those of you not fluent in Starbucks) and my unreasonable and untreatable anxiety for flying have me wondering how the hell I’m supposed to spend the next 3 ½ hours high above the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve been in the air now for more than 4 hours on what has been a seemingly unending non-stop flight from Dulles to Zurich. It’s 11:00pm EST, but I’ve already set my (Swiss) watch ahead to 5:00am Zurich time. That by itself should clue you in on my dilemma. By far, this is the longest plane ride I’ve taken… and though we’ve had pockets of minor turbulence here and there, this has to this point been a perfect flight. Meanwhile, Susie is reading her airport-purchased copy of ‘102 Minutes’, a newly released book which details many lesser known acts of heroism that took place inside the World Trade Center on September 11^th, 2001. Yeah, reassuring, I know. She is already up to page 72, and from what I can tell by rudely peeking over her shoulder; this is one hell of a good book. These movie choices are awful. I refuse to watch Catwoman… (can’t imagine why), and I’ve watched the National Geographic special on that super-long suspension bridge in Japan 3 times already. It was no doubt interesting, but once you’ve seen it 3 times... so I sat for about an hour reading Cornell West’s new book ‘Democracy Matters’ (which I highly recommend), but eventually tired of that too. Our flight is due to land at 8:00am Zurich time… and needless to say, no we haven’t slept since last night… so this should effectively throw our biological clocks into freak-out mode. Lord, please let Zurich have a Starbucks. Susie and I have our hiking boots and cameras, and we plan to take pictures of just about everything we see. Mom and dad have been scoping out fun things to do while we’re there, and last week sent a list of possible day trips… yada yada. From that list alone we should have endless possibilities for good pictures. Lake Zurich and the Alps would be more than enough material, but we have a full week planned, so we’ll no doubt see more than just that. Hopefully I’ll have internet access in our hotel room, which is a nice looking place, but seems pretty old… and from what I have been able to glean from 4,000 miles away, these crazy Europeans manage to get by just fine without superfluous amenities like the internet in their hotel rooms. And if they don’t have internet, frankly, I’m not sure how I’m even going to publish this post, much less the pictures. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Well, according to a digitized map of our trip, which has been 15 inches from my face for the past 2,600 miles, we still have 1,157 more miles to go. I’ll check back in later.