Three Routes Home

We arrived at the airport and the line was short to check in. I was a little hesitant, I knew once I was issued my tickets the end was approaching, but checked my luggage anyway. Then Ben and I grabbed one last beer in Africa. We needed something to help us take our malaria pills, which we would continue to take for the next 7 days after returning to the US. I was tired, we had been going the whole day, which included a community bucket of beer and 3 wine tastings, all I wanted was to get on the plane and fall asleep.


I woke up in Amsterdam. We traveled all around Africa, both internationally and domestically, some airports were not fully paved, some airports were just a shelter with no real enclosure, some people who checked us in did not speak English, but we never had a single problem, we always got where we wanted to, our luggage always arrived with us, and we were always on time. It took coming back to American to find problems. I have no idea why some people think American is the best country in the world, other than those people have probably never left the US. And so it took three tries to get home. My original flight was from Amsterdam to Seattle, the perfect rote. However Northwest changed the time it left Amsterdam and I would no longer be able to make that connection. So when I checked in they had updated my route from Amsterdam to Detroit, and then on to Seattle. I have no idea what happened to this flight but once I arrived in Amsterdam I found my ticket referred to a flight that did not seem to exist. After a quick stop at the service center I found I was now heading to Minneapolis and then on to Seattle. Ben and I said our good-byes, and I found a plane heading in the general direction of the United States that let me on.

The adventure was over, at least for now. I looked at the person sitting next to me on the flight from Minneapolis to Seattle, and I wondered what his story was, where had he been and why. Was he returning home to Seattle, traveling for business, visiting someone in the Pacific Northwest, or was he too coming back from his own adventure. Did he just finish climbing Everest, or swimming with the stingless jellyfish of Palau, or studying the Mayan calendar in Tikal, or maybe looking for new species in the Galapagos Islands, maybe even sand boarding the dunes of Namibia. Or would he even be able to grasp, appreciate, and understand the journey I had just been on. I then knew my adventure would never end, I smiled, and turned to him, and said “Hello….”