Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Actually, it was car, airport, plane, airport, plane, airport, bus. 33 hours worth of them, of which I slept for one. Most of it was relatively un-noteworthy though, which is probably a good thing. At some point the neck pillow I brought broke open in my bag, resulting in very very tiny pieces of Styrofoam filling my bag and contaminating everything in sight, and making a huge mess for the poor stewardesses to clean up. It was ridiculously staticky too, so you couldn't just brush it off of things because it flew right back. I'm still finding pieces of it.

















One thing happened on the flight to London that I consider pretty awesome: I had considered playing my mandolin at several points during the flight, but had decided not to because of other passengers, etc. But when we had two hours or so left, I thought "hey, we're 7 miles in the air, how awesome would it be to be able to say I'd played the mandolin 7 miles in the air?" and so I began to play, Irish music of course. I realized later that that sudden random urge had to have come to me almost exactly as we started flying over Ireland. Random, unconscious, and awesome.

Then there was a 7 hour layover in London, and a 2 hour flight to Marseilles (which is gorgeous from the air, especially in late-evening light), and a bus ride to Aix.

I feel it worth mentioning that I actually managed to get 5 months worth of stuff into one suitcase with extra space, but it weighed 53 pounds and the limit is 51, so I had to bring another suitcase to redistribute the weight. But I fit everything into one.