Saturday, September 29, 2007

Day 29: Another Red Eye Flight

Today's Travel Plans

- Metro to Athens Airport
- 3 hour Afternoon flight to Madrid
(5-hour stopover)
- 10 hour Midnight/red-eye to Johannesburg
(2 hour stopover)
- 2 hour flght to Cape Town
Prebooked taxi to hostel

Change in strategy for overnight flight:
After consulting with the medical professionals here at Randys Travel Diary, we decide to double up on all sleep medications and libations. I get on the plane and swallow two Lunestra pills. When a flight attendant comes by offering drinks, I get two beers. I'm am sitting next to a cool woman about my age and we are yucking it up. I start to get very buzzed. We are about 3 inches from each other. I start to have untoward thoughts about her. I let the thoughts pass by like clouds in the sky.

Eventually, she says good night, rolls over, and falls asleep. There are no movies on the plane, so I try to sleep. I have fitfull, drug-induced sleep, interspersed with wakeful periods of racing, untoward thoughts.

The remainder of travel is uneventful, except for check-in for flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town. The British Airways ticket agent doesn't recognize my ticket as a legit ticket. After 20 minutes of noodling around, I'm all set. (this concerns me: this woman at least spoke English. As I get into deeper, darker, non-English parts of my trip, ticket problems could become a real bummer.