Crossing the pond... and then some!!

OK, so we caught the bus just in time – Cédric having just finished his shower when I came back after 15minutes of running around paying bills, going to the bank, buying stamps, posting letters and getting painkillers FOR HIM...getting ready to leave the minute I came back... just to find him still undressed!!
But we made it and arrived at the airport in Nice with a good margin, especially because our flight was 1 hour late - apparently there had been bad weather in Frankfurt that morning, so everything was delayed. .. Now that wasn't such a big problem for us because we had a few hours before our connecting flight to N.Y., but I felt sorry for the people who lost their flight back to Washington – they weren't rescheduled until the next day!!
So we began check-in with these new machines where you do everything yourself and it went well until it came to getting Cédric checked in...: « No ticket registered in this name »..

SHIT.

I started to panic slightly and retried a few times, but always got the same answer... but he was on the confirmation e-mail and his ticket WAS paid!! Finally, a Lufthansa hostess saw my despair and came to our rescue, but in her own French way: « OK, you'll need to check with my colleague at the desk, but hurry; the flight closes in 2 minutes!! » WHAT??!!! The flight was I hour late for God's sake!! We ran to the counter and met a charming girl who was so shocked over her previous clients who had given her a hard time about her attitude in front of her boss, although she insisted that she was usually MUCH MORE rude than that (and her colleagues agreed), that a couple of sympathetic comments about how a couple of idiots could ruin your whole day made her forget we were late. We started joking about how I was going to go all by myself and that Cédric would have to stay in Nice, before he said « But it's my birthday.. » and she realized it was! THAT, I suspect, got him a free bottle of champagne by our on- flight Lufthansa attendant!! So we ended up drinking already in Frankfurt, where we BTW found an exquisite airport food court; who would have thought we'd drool over German snacks??!! But it was delicious ( and expensive), so we ended up having to drink the bottle « hiding » behind the main alley – couldn't get ourselves to drink inside the café – it would have been too obvious...LOL!

We finally boarded the flight to N.Y., and my plan about not sleeping worked! Cédric slept most of the time, but I found that a funny documentary about penguins and a charming movie about passion for food called « Julie/Julia », or vice versa, and yelling at a stupid kid in front of us who kept jumping in the seat while we tried to fill out the Immigration forms SEVERAL TIMES, kept me awake for the 8 hours. Wonder why Americans are so hung up about how to write 1s and 7s...

When we landed in N.Y. and passed Immigration with surprising ease, we took the sky-train to our next terminal and found it rather empty; we thought that was great, because all we wanted to do was sleep! We went out on re-con, but since all we could hear about was CNN reporting about some loony gone mad shooting everybody in Fort Hood, (and where Larry King, Dr. Phil and other journalists kept hitting each other on the head about whether or not it was a terrorist act), we went back to get some sleep...we thought! Just after having uncomfortably installed ourselves on the airport seats, an Indian security guard came and told us that this terminal would close between midnight and 4am, so we had to move to Terminal 4, where we spent the worst night EVER!! Horrible seats and never-ending hours... At 4a.m. we went back to T7 and checked-in on United 5 to San Francisco. Cédric forgot his manners and went through security with a bottle of water and got an angry black lady with a mask yelling at him because they had to rescan his bag... BTW, we never used our masks – I don't think I've ever been on a flight with so few sick people!!! Maybe they're scared witless of the swine flu...

And now we're flying over I don't know which states on our way to California, but GOD: there are some weird landscapes here!! Lots of small black squares (solar cell panels?) and (crop) circles – and canyons, of course! Very nice... but all I can think about is getting some dollars and buy candy – the guy next to me opened a packet of Lifesavers with EU-lawbreaking smells...YUMMY!!!