Anchors Aweigh

All good things come to an end. I will miss my all but daily trips to Kaladi Brothers Coffee shops. I don’t think I’ve visited all possible branches, but I’ve been to quite a few!

On the way back home on Sunday afternoon, I noticed how bald the trees are now. They were green when we arrived, yellow for a while and now devoid of all foliage.

Aaron, Jodi, Asa and Gideon joined us for dinner one more time. It reinforced how hard it will be to move on.

That, plus we’d chatted with Martha and William on Whatsapp (and Jenny and Liam to a lesser extent) earlier; and on this day, William’s 11th month birthday, the slippery slope to homesickness beckoned for the first time, really.

On our last full day in Alaska, we started packing. We’re still tryig to travel light but somehow our bags are now heavier than they used to be! I have a couple of new shirts, but I did throw away a holey, bloody pair of socks (blood from small stone burrowing into my heel).

Liesel had her final appointment with the physiotherapist who showed me the spot on Liesel’s back where I can poke and prod in an effort to ease her discomfort. (By spot, I mean the location an inch to the right of Liesel’s sacral shelf, not an actual spot, although there is a nearby freckle to help guide me.)

We visited Amy and her folks Wayne and Cathy one last time. This was another emotional parting.

After another spell of packing (here’s a tip: refolding items and rotating them doesn’t reduce their weight), we went to see the boys one last time. Amongst other things, we grown-ups discussed whether the boys should be allowed to watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I don’t know, all I could remember was the song, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. We also mentioned the the larger-than-life character Mr Creosote who came to grief in The Meaning of Life. Could such a person really exist?

Again, saying goodbye was hard but they, and Anchorage, will still be there, and we hope they visit us in England one day (hint, hint).

In the evening, we joined Una, Phil and Kiran at Seoul Casa. As the name implies (does it?) this is a Korean-Mexican fusion restaurant. The kimchi-rito was a very fat burrito with cabbage and tofu and very nice but again, too much for this Englsih stomach.

Another sad but fond farewell. We’re going to miss the people and places of Anchorage but, let’s be positive, we are continuing our adventure for several more months and that can only be a good thing.

We rose at sparrowfart Tuesday morning for our early flight to Seattle. I finished my packing just in time before Klaus and Leslie drove us to the airport. The final emotional goodbye but we soon forgot about that when we entered the airport.

We used a machine to check in. It knew about Liesel but not about me. So we had to go to a desk and get help. There, we were told how busy it was, the security queue was miles long and we only had ten minutes! Holy moly. Because we’d checked in at different desks, we were seated ten rows apart. I was randomly given TSA Pre-check status so I went striaght to the front of the security queue while ordinary people such as Liesel waited and waited and waited.

We made the flight ok, and we were both in the middle seat of our respective rows. The other day, we found out that airline etiquette says that if you’re in the middle seat, you have the right to use both armrests. But guess who I was sitting next to? That’s right: Mr Creosote. There was no way I could pull down the armrest between me and him!

We appreciated the entertainment provided by the Alaskan Air crew. The girl at the gate sang for us and the chief steward on the plane was very funny too, with her commentary, especially telling people to wait for the ‘ding’ before being allowed to stand up when the plane finished taxiing.

I read for the duration of the flight

We were a little late arriveing at Seattle and our next flight is delayed even further.

We checked in for our next flight on the only airline that I know of named after a John Wayne film: Hainan. There was a problem with my passport (I think) but I don’t know what it was, or why it took so long to check me in. Confusion between UK, EU and GBR? We don’t know whether our veggie meals are still on the system, so we’ve acquired some snacks, just in case.

We had a nice lunch at Floret, a vegetarian restaurant in the A Gates area. Don’t be put off by the fact that it looks like a wine bar. I had shepherds pie made with lentils, very nice, but not as nice as Jyoti’s dahl, of course.

So here we are, sleepless in Seattle waiting to board our flight to… wait for it… Beijing…