This Trip, Part IX: 29 March 2011

When your home time zone is 6 hours behind Greenwich Mean Time and you’re awake at 5:30am GMT, you know it’ll be a long day. More so, a long day that begins with the usual fretting about getting everything packed and getting to the airport on time. Thankfully all of those worries diminished as the morning progressed and hurdles were cleared. Once I made it to Terminal 4, Gate 14 at Heathrow, I began to notice something odd. There were a few middle-aged men dressed like the band Anvil, complete with long stringy hair, lots of chains, earrings and almost exclusively black clothing. I noticed it, but didn’t really think about it too much until I noticed several more.

Upon boarding, I had to ask the guy behind me the obvious question in the most obvious way possible: "This may seem like an obvious questions, but are you guys in a band?". Of course I knew they were in a band, but it seemed a bit brusque to simply lead off with "What band are you in?". At this point, I was sure this was actually multiple bands, possibly on tour together. Nope, turns out this epic assemblage of rockers was none other than the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, along with their crew and tag-alongs. Most of these tag-alongs came in the form of young girls that could just have easily been their daughters, but there was no hope for such normalcy.

The prospect of a long flight with about 50 grown men on tour was a bit worrisome, especially since they were spread throughout the plane, including directly behind me. I had an exit row seat for this long flight and one of the young groupies was my neighbor, but she made her intent known very quickly that she would be relocating in order to (paraphrasing) "sit next to someone she could fall asleep on". I guess I should consider myself lucky for that little twist of fate and declaration. As it turns out, there were a good many empty seats on the plane and nobody ended up being my neighbor for the flight. Sitting in the exit row without a neighbor actually provides enough space to be comfortable for an 8-plus hour flight.

The most troubling part of the flight was the extremely cold air seeping in the door, next to my feet. I thought it was a little troubling that this air was seeping in at 30,000 feet since the cabin is supposedly pressurized. I finally wedged the little pillow and blanket at my seat in the crack of the door, which helped somewhat. Upon arrival in Detroit, we were very delayed exiting the plane because we didn't have a gate or something. The friendly steward guy was standing next to me, so I mentioned the freezing air coming in during the flight. He just laughed and said that kind of plane (767-400) was prone to do that because there wasn't a perfect seal. I smiled because we were already on the ground.

It was a very bright and sunny day in Detroit, but apparently only about 40 degrees outside. Of course, you'd never know that from the warm confines of DTW, which never fails to impress me as a really nice airport. The weather out of Detroit was also very nice looking, but the invisible wind over Toledo made for a little bit of teeth gnashing aboard the little CRJ200. Nothing against Toledo, per se, but it certainly does not make for a fond remembrance of a place when your stomach is in your throat whilst flying over.