I arrived at the airport and dropped my car off at 6:30 am. This gave me plenty of time to lug my two bags (50 lbs. and 70 lbs.) to the South African Airways (SAA) check-in counter in Terminal 4. I caught the AirTrain to Terminal 4 and arrived at the SAA counter at 7:00 am. Since counter wasn't open, I had to wait in a queue outside queue area for the counter until it opened at 7:20 am.
Standing in front of me in this queue for the queue (queue-ception, anyone?) where a mother and her high school-aged daughter from South Africa. From their conversation, I learned that the mother was flying to Toronto while the daughter would be flying home to Johannesburg for the first time by herself. The mother was trying to reassure her daughter by making friends with those around her so she would have people who could help her out if she needed help. At one point she pulled me aside and asked me to make sure her daughter made it on the plane. I assured her that I would.
When the SAA counter opened, I began the actual queue. Because I had an overweight bag, I had to go back to the SAA ticket desk to pay the fee. After that I returned to the counter to pick up my boarding passes. Then I was off to my security showdown with the TSA. I was a bit concerned since I was wearing a money belt underneath my clothes with a sizeable amount of money for one of the missionaries. Fortunately, with God’s help, I made it through the checkpoint without a hitch.
I arrived at my gate of departure with a couple of hours to spare, but I came prepared with the entire Lord of the Rings series including The Hobbit. I sat down and did a quick glance to see if the girl had made it to the gate. I didn't see her, but there was still a lot of time so I assumed she was probably in the airport mall somewhere. I read until the point in The Hobbit where the first movie of the new trilogy ended and decided to take a stroll to get a little last minute exercise before my 15 hour flight.
The secondary purpose of my walk was to see if the girl had gotten to the correct gate. I still didn't see her when I returned from my walk. By this time the number of people at the gate had grown to over a hundred. There wasn't much I could do, but pray that she would make it alright. When they finally announced that we could start boarding the plane, I saw that the girl was actually sitting pretty close to where I was, but the glare from the windows had prevented me from noticing her.
I boarded the plane at 10:45 am. I had a window seat near the back of the Airbus so I had a decent view throughout the flight. The plane was almost entirely full, and a large number of the seats near me were filled with a group of high schoolers from a boarding school in Massachusetts. The person beside me was one of these students. They were traveling to South Africa were a study abroad program for a few weeks. I won’t go into much detail about my flight because it was so long and a lot of it was boring. Instead, I’ll highlight a few of the more interesting parts.
The majority of my time was spent trying to pass the time. I read a good deal of The Hobbit and then decided to watch Lincoln after eating dinner. When I originally wrote this journal entry, I couldn't remember which movie I had watched. I assure you that this had nothing to do with what I thought about Lincoln. I thought it was a very well done movie, but a 150 minute movie on a dark plane after eating a meal at the end of a day when I woke up at 4:00 am seemed to do more to help me fall asleep than to pique my interest.
I was thankful for the two hours of sleep I got after the movie because it was the longest amount I got during the whole flight. The rest of my attempts to catch some good, old-fashioned shut-eye were quite literally just that—me sitting there with my eyes shut. I decided to try another movie and chose a documentary about the history of technological advances in animal filmography. Now you are probably thinking, “Sam, if you couldn't stay awake through Lincoln, how in the world are you going to stay awake through this one?” Let’s just say I had a little help from my friend, David Attenborough. If you've ever watched Planet Earth then you know what I’m talking about. David Attenborough, with his British accent and playful commentary, can make you fascinated with even the most boring topic.
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| Seriously, I'd pay to have him follow me around and do commentary on my life. |
At this point in the flight I thought that it couldn't be much longer until we landed in Johannesburg. I checked the in-flight GPS and was horrified to see that we still had another 8 hours! I chose another movie to watch, Life of Pi. I’m not going to lie; I was expecting this movie to have something remotely to do with math so I was a bit disappointed when I found out it didn't. I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, so I just give some general details about the movie. The story is heavily post-modern and deals a lot with à la carte religion where a person picks and chooses pieces of different religions to form their own religion which suits them. The ending of the movie forces the viewer to subjectively choose one of two endings that they would rather believe to be true.
The rest of the flight was long and the fact that I couldn't fall asleep complicated the situation. I was happy when they served us breakfast even though the blueberry “crêpe” was hard to stomach. I was thankful for all my long car trip experiences which helped to prepare me for this. The hardest part of all was when there were 8 hours left since I came to the realization that we were less than halfway to Johannesburg.
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| My first sight of land. Somewhere over South Africa. |
Finally, we landed in Johannesburg at 7:20 am, but I thought it was only 5:20 am due to the fact that the in-flight GPS had the incorrect time. This discrepancy will play a role later in the story. At the time I was more concerned with getting off the plane and walking around.
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