Losing a day

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February 3rd/4th, 2018 – Well I made it out of Terrace and got home with enough time to throw my things in the laundry, get Gizmo to the vet clinic to board, grab Loki’s meds and some cat food to leave with Lee who is to live in our place for the week and look after the cats, clean the house a little bit so as to not be overly embarrassed with someone living here for a week, pack, and grab a cab to the airport at noon for a 3pm direct flight on KLM to Amsterdam.

Kirk gets a little fidgety where flying is concerned; there is someone out there, someone not so nice, with a similar name and he gets flagged frequently when he crosses through US border security. Oddly it only happens at the airport and he and I cross the border frequently in the summer to go motorcycling across the line without incident. We both have Nexus passes and are considered safe travellers, but he still gets harassed when he flies into the US, at least more often than not.

But everything went smoothly, and I decided that it’s because he’s with me. I’m a last minute traveller and I am happy if I can come skidding up to the boarding gate just as loading begins. I dislike the waiting period. But, because of Kirk’s many adventures at the airport, he likes to be three hours early for an international flight. So we compromise…..we go early and check the luggage, maybe clear security, and maybe do a little light shopping before a nice meal and a bottle of wine.

The flight we were on called the different seating areas differently than I’ve seen before. There is Economy at the back, then they had something called “Comfort Economy” that provided extra legroom (which I seem to recall being called business class), and then they had Business Class which, on a glance, was what has always been identified as First Class. We were in the Comfort Economy, which did have more room than many flights I’ve been on (not including the planes I usually travel on which generally seat between 5 and 20 passengers), and for a nine and a half hour flight it was better than I’ve experienced.

However.

About nine years ago we took a flight to Greece with a change in Heathrow. Halfway over the Atlantic I felt queasy and got up to go to the washroom to sit and get my head down. I didn’t quite make it and instead passed out just as I was trying to push the door open. I was sick for the remainder of the flight and the seven hours we had in London ended up at a hotel at the airport to have a nap and a shower and make sure I could make the rest of the trip. Kirk treated me like a china doll for the remainder of that trip and all the way home. He’s also always been nervous of me flying ever since and for our last two major long flights (France and Jamaica) he has made me sit at the window so that if I get up I have to crawl over him so he knows I am out of my seat. Silly.

That said….I thought I was going to have a similar incident on the way to the Netherlands. Halfway across, in the middle of the night, I felt that old familiar feeling. There were no air jets at our seat and the air was hot and stagnant and I assume they turned everything down, including the oxygen levels, to put everyone to sleep. The problem is that I have always been overly heat sensitive (one reason I don’t have a great urge to travel to hot countries all that often), and I have a fairly high heart rate. That adds up to, presumably, a relatively high metabolic rate coupled with a low environmental oxygen and I think by body goes into a bit of a physiological panic and tries to shut down. I felt that queasiness coming on, shut my eyes and felt that roaring and greyness take over, so I made the effort to hyperventilate and managed to get it to pass. It came on once or twice more but again it passed, thankfully.

When Kirk woke up I said “Guess what…I shouldn’t tell you this…but…” He was thrilled of course.

The rest of the trip was uneventful and we arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam without further incident, found our luggage, and figured out how to get out and find a cab.

Cool trivia, the majority of taxis funnelling through the airport and dropping off and picking up passengers were Teslas. I’ve never seen so many Teslas in one location!

Our taxi driver found our little old hotel in the Appololaan area of Amsterdam, but since we’d crossed over a day along the way, it was too early to check in. We left our luggage behind and went walking into the city centre. Kirk was going to be busy with the trade show the entire week so this partial day, and maybe a partial day at the end of the week, would be the only time we would see each other, so we took advantage of the fair skies (but cold wind) and put some kilometres on.

We walked into the city centre, took a canal boat ride and learned some history of the canals and the canal building architecture. We learned about the dams and how they changed the cityscape, and how the people of this amazing country completely reshaped their world through water and land manipulation.

We grabbed a quick bite at a pub, snacked on bitterballen, vlammetjes, and kroketten, and washed it down with some dark beer before making our way back to the hotel, checking in, and getting a good night’s sleep before the chaos of the week was to begin.

Day one took a day and a half, but I was glad to have made it along, since I’d thought I might be losing my ticket with the weather back in Terrace.

The view sure changed in 36 hours 🙂

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