Jon stayed at my house Wednesday night and early next morning, drove me to Schiphol where we met up with Marjon who came to to see me off.
At that point I was still not nervous about the complex trip I was about to undertake, I was more concerned with the formalities and whether the planes would be so kind as to stay in the air when they were supposed to!
At Schiphol, the security was very tight. I got interviewed, asked many questions I felt nobody had the right to ask me, and generally felt like I was taking my life into my hands by choosing to fly to the USA. Walking through the state of the art scanning apparatus, I was pulled aside and questioned - it seems they could see some evidence of my recent gall bladder surgery. I was quite shocked about that.
Flew from Amsterdam Schiphol to Halifax via Chicago airport.
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| Goodbye Holland! |
Flight was good, I managed to sleep much of the way over to Chicago. Happened to look out the window at the exact right times, saw awesome scenery (glaciers, icebergs and so on) flying over Greenland and later again coming in over (Goose Bay) Canada and nearing Chicago.
Chicago airport is my idea of hell: I was fingerprinted, iris-scanned, examined and interviewed, yelled at, de-shoed and glared at by hatchet faced security people... I felt like a criminal and very much as if one accidental wrong move would get me killed on the spot. A very Orwellian experience.
I changed over to a smaller plane to Halifax, Canada and flew off into the sunset. A much more relaxed atmosphere on this flight, and my arrival in the middle of the night, in Halifax felt like a welcoming warm bath: I got off the plane into a world where nobody gave a damn, the mood was mellow and the pace gentle. A bit like the old days....
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