Day 4 - New York

We all knew that the weather would be good Monday, but actually seeing the sun come out on the day we were leaving perturbed us. Nonetheless, we enjoyed the great weather on the way to Ronkonkoma Station. Public transportation is so easy! There we took a train to Jamaica Station and transferred to a monorail that takes us to JFK airport. If only Orlando would have some kind of lite-rail system from the beach to its airport, it would save a lot of hassle with parking or getting people to take us to the airport. Compared to Orlando’s airport, JFK is large and compared to Louisville’s airport, JFK is jinormous. There are about 5 terminals and depending on which airline you are taking determines which terminal you go to. Our airline, Olympic, is in terminal 1, so we didn’t get to see any of the other terminals. Within our terminal, there were about 10 aisles with ticket counters and check-in counters for each airline. Terminal 1 appeared to be dedicated to international flights; as we walked by, there was Air Korea, Air France, etc.

Before we left this morning, we spent a good hour trying to redistribute the weight of our baggage so that our carry-on luggage had most of the weight and our checked baggage would be below the 44lb limit. Upon checking in, they didn’t weigh the bags from what I could see and they didn’t say anything to us about being over the limit. I’m wondering if they even weighed the bags rendering our efforts this morning useless. Going through the security checkpoint was nothing different from an ordinary domestic flight. We got to our gate about 2.5 hours before our flight just in case the screening process was long or if we had to go through special lines for an international flight. The gates were pretty empty when we got there but soon became buzzing with people leaving New York to go to all parts of the world: Beijing, Istanbul, and Athens.

Our plane arrived at the gate and was a large Airbus with four engines. While we were boarding the plane, Katie was greeted with something in Greek while I got a good ole “Hello.” That’s not the first time Katie had been mistaken for speaking their language. While at a wedding of a friend, Hispanic friends of the bride approached Katie while speaking Spanish. Each row in the economy (poor) seating class had two seats near one window, an aisle, four seats in the middle, another aisle, and another two seats near the other window. We were in row 36 near the back of the plane in the two seats near a window. The flight was quite empty, carrying no more than three or four people in each row. Each seat had a video screen in its headrest to show our current location on a map, temperature, the local time, etc. It also was showing movies like Kung Fu Panda and the new Indiana Jones. After backing out of the gate, we waited in line to get to the runway for a good hour. Prior to this flight, the longest I’ve had to wait in line is maybe 15 minutes and even that seemed long. I suppose that’s the way it is at an airport where everyone is trying to fly all over the world. I slept through most of the wait. Who knows what Katie was doing, since I was asleep. I suspect she was reading.

So we departed the United States for the first time around 5:30pm eastern time (our bodies’ time). We were on our way to a foreign country nearly on the other side of the world. We knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore when the all of the flight attendants and passengers were speaking Greek. Thankfully they also spoke English and the videos were also in English with Greek subtitles. The trip would be very difficult if no one spoke any English. About an hour into the flight, the sun set on the horizon which mimicked many pictures I’ve seen of sunsets from the International Space Station. Up there, one happens every 90 minutes.

Dinner soon followed which was surprisingly a nice spread from the peanuts and cheese nips I’m used to on a plane. We both chose tortellini over turkey, both of which came with tuna fish, a dish with chopped cucumber and tomatoes, a hot roll, and some kind of dessert. We had our choice of tea, coke, water, orange juice, and wine. We chose the wine after finding out that it was free.

After dinner, the cabin lights were turned out to encourage sleep. The next seven hours of our flight were spent watching videos on the screen, watching episodes of The Office on our DVD player, trying to sleep, reading, trying to sleep and listening to podcasts while trying to sleep. I wasn’t able to sleep and neither was Katie. I brought a blindfold and ear plugs to help, but my body wasn’t tired enough and comfortable enough to fall asleep. Instead, I opted to watch the video screen update our location, local time, and estimated time remaining. The map showed us flying over Ireland. Seeing the icon of our plane over Ireland and seeing Greenland on the same screen as us was very surreal. We also flew over London, the Alps, and the northern part of Italy. The outside temperature read -60°C (-140°C) at an altitude of 11,300m (33,000 ft). Brrrrr! The local time kept changing, as we flew over time zones. If we didn’t get to sleep soon, the sun would be coming up.