"If God Wanted Us To Fly, He'd Buy The Tickets"

Well, that sucked. The experience of overseas travel is rarely a pleasant one, but I didn't know that my seatmate was going to be Murphy S. Law for essentially the entire trip. Please do not take this as some sort of typical travel gripe, this is a spectacular travel gripe.

The first leg is easy enough, a quick hour flight down to Tokyo, a short bus ride to Narita Airport and I'm on my way. Little do I know that United is the only American carrier that operates out of Narita's horrendous Terminal 1. Terminal 1 is the Charlie Murphy of airport terminals, overshadowed by the larger, more successful Terminal 2 in more ways that one. Terminal 1 is smaller, poorly designed, and offers little to no food or shops for travelers to lick their wounds in before continuing on to the next leg of their adventures. It was easy enough to overlook though as my time spent in Terminal 1 was brief and boarding my flight to Houston was a simple albeit arduous process.

This already seems like an unnecessarily long gripe about what was ultimately a 24 hour trip, but bear with me, I'm getting to the good part now. You would assume that the worst part about the journey would be the 12 hour leg from Tokyo to Houston, and that assumption would be correct. However, there were other outlying and highly annoying factors that contributed to the general suckiness of my travels. I normally cannot sleep on flights without help from our always safety conscious pharmaceutics companies, so I enjoy the company of fine cinema to fill the maddening void of time that is most comparable to prisoners in solitary. I was initially impressed with United Airline's extensive in flight entertainment database, which is by far the most comprehensive in all of air travel. Unfortunately, bad luck was on my side when my seat was being selected and I was left with what I assume to be the only busted audio jack in all of the 777 aircraft. Silence accompanied my movie watching endeavor and to be honest, Mel Gibson being castrated and emphatically screaming "FREEEDOMMM"  at the end of "Braveheart" just doesn't have the same emotional effect when it can be just as easily performed by Charlie Chaplin. The normal fix would be to just simply change seats, but on a full flight, you're shoulder to shoulder with people that are just as uncomfortable and pissed off as you are, and convenience asphyxiates in the thin air. This was just the start of my woes as Murphy snickered devilishly at the misfortune that was yet to board the aircraft.

Airplane food is always bad, so I'm not even going to mention that. But, even airplane food isn't as bad as the people who you have to suffer the flight with. I'm with Dennis Miller who says he likes to get on a plane and unwind with a good book or movie and not engage in conversation with fellow passengers. I'm not happy, you're not happy, so why not be unhappy in silence? On this flight however, I was not so lucky. I had to sit in the middle of a troupe sized transitional Vietnamese family and their overly rambunctious offspring. The children took every opportunity to yell, cry, kick, scream, giggle, climb, jump and scurry all over the seats within my general proximity for the entirety of the 12 hour flight just to prove to me that some children most certainly aren't the future. So, I'm having to spend a majority of the time recreating my entire life story from DNA up to that very afternoon whilst fighting off the encroaching horde of children that threatened to overtake my personal space and my sanity before long. Somehow though, I was able to keep a calm and pleasant demeanor however and it made me appreciate the precious, solitary moments in the lavatory.

I landed in Houston with an uncanny optimism that somehow survived the near constant wailing of children who were experiencing "rapid depressurization" for the first time. I was happy to be off the plane and on the move again as I put the soul sucking part of my journey far behind me. That optimism soon faded to despair however as I entered the labyrinth of George W. Bush International Airport. Airports have a tendency to be confusing to some travelers and understandably so. There is nothing more American than pure, unbridled bureaucracy and that bureaucracy is epitomized by GW Bush Airport. Houston had me walking through parts of the airport I didn't even know existed just to get to the customs and immigration section, and on more than one occasion I felt as though I was heading into some restricted area and would soon be hauled off by angry airport workers. That adventure was nothing compared to the one I encountered upon finally reaching customs and immigration. The fine folks at Houston had apparently not expected to have several international flights land at one time so only about half of the allowed customs booths were open at the time of my arrival. This led to almost 2 hours standing in line waiting for a process that only took about 30 seconds to complete. The process took so long in fact that my plans to visit the USO and unwind had to be scratched as I sprinted up the never-ending flights of stairs to board my flight to Orlando that luckily waited for me to complete my Houston Two Step.

I was able to catch several breaks on my flight to Orlando and I'm now safely and sanely resting in the comfort of family and friends. Four days will not be enough to recover from this nightmare scenario but I intend on making the best of my R and R period before going on the move again. Greece is a few short days away and hopefully Murphy had his fun and will leave my classmates and I alone as we once again brave the treacherous waters of international air travel.

This is the condensed version. I could go into every detail and make you relive the horror of the trip until you  were blue in the face. I, nor you, have that sort of time and patience unfortunately and I'm not sure that I could emotionally handle reliving the more painful moments.

Schadenfreude. Enjoy.