...neither upon rising before the sun on Friday morning, after the first hot showers and a night's sleep where we all four slept in real beds for the first time in two weeks, in a comfortable, air conditioned, seventh floor hotel room in Panama City...
...nor a little while later that morning, while spotting lavishly painted buses and listening (ironically, it turned out) to the theme from the Greatest American Hero "flying away on a wing and a prayer" and the theme from Arthur "when you get caught between the moon and New York City" playing on the radio in a taxi on the way to the airport...
...that by eleven thirty that night we would find ourselves settling in at Camp Newark and that this would be the view from our makeshift beds...
...and that by Saturday evening we will have found ourselves standing in various lines (customs, getting standby status on a flight, bathrooms, purchasing food, reconfirming our standby status, security, etc...) for a total of at least 10 hours.
I guess when you book yourself to travel through 5 different airports within a day and a half period of time you're bound to have trouble some time or another.
Knitting content?
1. First thing after getting through customs and sizing up our circumstances (besides instantly feeling a tickle in my throat which went into a full blown sore throat over night): plop down on top of my pack to weave in the ends on a pair of socks I'd finished knitting in Panama so that I could put them on my feet. (C and the boys packed one pair each.) You see, knitting socks is practical.
2. In the middle of the night, after only an hour or so of fitful sleep, too chilled to sleep on the cold floor any longer, I sat up the rest of the night working on a pair of socks for my brother who was only a cab ride away in Queens with a comfortable air mattress bed ready and made waiting for us, if only we could just get there. The wait was up to an hour or two long or even more just to get a cab and to do so you had to wait outside all that time in the sleet and wind. We didn't have warm enough clothes to do so, with our without colds. Had we been able to get to him or he to us, the in-progress socks could have had a proper fitting on his feet.
3. Sunday afternoon, finally back in spring-like weather in Seattle and after a decent night's sleep at my parents' house, my brother called me, raving about the Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design that he'd just come from seeing. I suspect he went just to spite me for catching a Saturday evening flight on standby rather than accepting our later, rebooked flight on Tuesday and coming to stay with him. Had I known about this show, it might have been just the thing to sway me into staying, which was an option. C could have gotten on the flight with the boys and have continued on home, leaving the boys with my parents until I came behind them a few days later.
Realistically I'm not sure I would have been up for facing NYC fo the first time on little to no sleep. We aren't able to pull off all nighters the way we used to. R had been fevering through part of the night before in Panama City so I had been up a couple of times checking his temperature, fretting about things like dengue fever and malaria, dosing him with Tylenol, and covering him with a wet towel to bring his fever down, which it was by morning before we boarded the plane to Newark. Sleeping on a cold floor the next night didn't help any, leaving him with a deep, coarse cough.
It's time though for this adventure, or series of them, to come to an end. Cross your fingers. Only 10 more hours of driving to go today. At least that means more knitting and sleep along the way.
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