My butt will never recover

I MADE IT! 10 hours on an airplane (bit more than that) and I survived! My butt hurts really badly, my back and neck are cramped and sore, but I'm sitting in Kate's cute English house and have already gone through a thunderstorm, went to the post office, and picked her kid's up from school.

I'm severely sleeped deprived, so forgive me for any spelling and grammar mistakes (big ones). I have been up now for 24 hours and have had about 3 hours of sleep total between various short snoozes. I think my longest snooze was a bit more than hour on the plane.

Wait, I should start in order.

I got up around 8 am to call AT&T to activate my international calling plan. It took a bit, but I got it done. Then around 9 my mom and I left for my bank to deposit money and ask about about letting them know I'm going out of the country and not to close my account. Well, after spending about 15 minutes on a dumb phone tree TRYING to figure out how to talk to a real person, I finally did and they put a travel alert on my card so they wouldn't close it while I'm here (my primary source for money!). Mom and I drove to San Fran in seemingly record time and got food at BK and walked around this mall/shopping center. We went to the airport around 1 pm and I checked my luggage in and went to security. Went through security and found my gate fine. I sat on the 2nd floor watching my plane (Virgin Atlantic) arrive at the gate, get stocked, and all that. Then we boarded. I've never been on a 747 before and it was nice. The TV screens on the back of the seat, we had a little remote thingy so we could play games, watch various movies (LOTS of movies to choose from), and even some TV episodes. They also gave us "new" blankets, pillows, headphones, and little travel packs that had an eyemask, socks, toothbrush, toothpaste, pen, and something else.

They originally filled Laurie's seat so I was going to be stuck in the middle between two guys, but the row in front (at an emergency exit) had only 1 person there so the guy in the window seat in my row moved to the row in front. So I moved to the window seat and the guy next to me (in the aisle) kept that seat and we used the middle seat as a holding all our junk or whatever seat. It worked out nice. He was very nice too, though we didn't talk much. He was going to London for business and thinks Harry will live!

The meals weren't bad. They started off with a drink and pretzels (replacing the peanuts). About an hour or 1.5 hours later they came around with the dinner meal. It was roast beef, chicken, or a pasta with rice and beans. The food was hot (I burned my tongue a bit), which was nice. I had the chicken with gravy, I think it was, and it was pretty good. They also gave you a small bottle of water, small glass for wine (if you wanted it for free - I turned it down), crackers and cheese, cup for tea or coffee, oreo cheesecake slice for dessert, a roll, a chocolate mint, a very nice paper napkin (it was really thick, which is why I noticed), and a salad with fetta, olives, a tomato (didn't eat that!) with Italian dressing on the side. Overall, the best meal I've had on a plane! I was hungry going on, but was full afterwards. For breakfast it was a hot cheese, egg, croissant thing (I had fallen asleep for a bit over an hour and couldn't bear to eat it, so I gave it to the guy sitting next to me who ate his breakfast in record time) with fresh fruit (really good), OJ, blueberry muffin, and cup for tea or coffee.

Because we had the screens in front of us to watch, I watched (or attempted to) The Prestige (Christian Bale, and some other very good actors), Catch and Release (I think that's what it's called, a romance movie with Jennifer Garner and some guy and the actress who plays Aunt Petunia is in it!), and I started to watch Casino Royale, which I've watched before. I started to watch an episode of CSI: NY, but we were about to land and lost out on that. I also listened to Kelly Clarkson's CD Breakaway about 10 times (to help me try to sleep and ignore all the noise behind me).

Overall, the plane flight was fine. I got up twice, endured two small children behind me, which one would scream/cry every once in a while and the other would kick my chair behind me a few times, and slept a bit. I mostly rested or rested in vain to try and sleep. It was funny because I had worked it out and thought if I could fall asleep at this one point, I could get about 6 hours of sleep. Well, of course, I didn't sleep through most of that (short snoozes). So then I started thinking I was going to fall asleep RIGHT before they serve breakfast and that's what happened. I jerked awake (for some reason) and they were just serving breakfast in my row. I couldn't go back to sleep after that. So it's 4:15pm here and I'm about to drop dead because I'm sleep deprived and my body is saying it's 8:15am back home.

Getting to/out of the airport was interesting. We had "traffic" so we circled for about 10 minutes and finally landed (not the most pleasant landing I've experienced, but not the worst either). Then it took us another 20 minutes to get OFF the plane (after taxi-ing around), then I had to go through customs (no problems there), which had a line, and then go to baggage claim which meant I stood waiting for my backpack to show up for about 25 minutes! It took FOREVER. Kate was there waiting at the end where you exit, though, so that was nice. It was a couple hour drive back to her home from the airport and I slept maybe another 30 minutes in the car.

We arrived at the house in a rain/thunderstorm which was fun for me! Kate didn't enjoy it so much, but she also lives here and I'm weather deprived coming from California and all that. :P The other neat thing about flying into London was I saw the most amazing clouds! They were so white and fluffy. I hadn't seen the likes of it before so it was fun to see.

We went to the girls' school to pick them up and went to the post office, so that was neat to see. She lives in the CUTEST village and there are some REALLY nice, cute houses around here. Driving on the other side of the road didn't bother me (just seemed backwards, but not "weird" (if that makes sense)) until we hit the 2-lane roads and the 2-lane roads with cars parked on either side. That's when it became weird. Though, I did try to get into the car on the wrong side when I first got to her car. LoL I even told myself a few minutes before hand not to do it and I did. I blame it on the lack of sleep! I haven't done it since!

With this long (as Kate puts it) "novel" I am going to go rest, I think. :)