Long day of travel

Saturday, July 21 2007

It went pretty well, here are some NWA planes lined up on the tarmac as we were taxiing out...


Bye bye Detroit...


Next stop was Hartford Connecticut, nothing special there.
Then from Hartford was a 8 hour flight to Amsterdam. It was painfully long but the flight attendants were really cool about bringing around food, wine and beer. The food was surprisingly good and they didn't charge for drinks. Last time I flew they always wanted to nickel and dime you for drinks.


Had a 4 hour layover in Amsterdam, but it was kinda fun. I met and talked with several people who were also going to India and they filled my in on several first-person details about what I might expect there. Also had a couple stiff drinks while sitting around in the airport, mainly so I could get some sleep on the third and final leg of the trip, which was a 9 hour flight.

It worked and I slept probably 7 1/2 hours on that flight! Woke up only a couple times to eat and have a glass of wine then right back out again. The food again was really good, I was quite impressed with the food and service on both of the long flights.

Landed in Mumbai right on time, the smell was overwhelming. Kinda dirty smoggy smelling. The airport was nice and air conditioned. No mosquitoes. Customs was cake. Then there was a luggage check for people bringing in fruits and stuff, but there was a senior guy there who was flagging American travelers and letting them bypass that because we usually only bring clothes and stuff, myself included. Then the third bottleneck where a guy took your customs slip to let you actually in the country, except nobody told anybody that you had to stop and fill out this particular customs slip, so everybody, including me got stopped and had to fill it out. Major bottleneck there.

Then out the doors of the airport and there were thousands of people everywhere, with hundreds of signs to identify people. I spotted mine right away because my guy had it on a long stick way up in the air. I could barely see the guy holding it due to the sheer amount of people there.
It is humid as hell, Louisiana takes a distant second to the wall of pure humidity here!

Driving is insane. They DO drive on the left with a right side steering wheel. Beeping and close calls every second on the road. Glad I wasn't driving.

My Hotel is O.K. Kinda dumpy by my standards, but it's clean and has air. Not much toilet paper though...



About a half a role and thats it...


I have a pigeon friend on my ledge thing outside the window...



And here's the traffic that will likely be honking and beeping all night long...

I haven't seen Mumbai during the day yet so this is all I have.
Tomorrow we leave at about 10am to drive to Balapur (sp), which is about a 2 1/2 hour drive. I hope to get more of a scope of this place as well as more pictures.

Not exactly sure when I'll be able to update again, I actually had to pay to get online for this one. $3.75 us for an hour... whatever, it's fun!

Oh yea, total trip time... 25.21 hours!
I ran my stopwatch from the gate in Detroit until after customs in Mumbai.