Half Way Home

We are the Frankfurt airport waiting for our flight back to Denver. We just had some café lattes and chocolate croissants and are looking out the window on the sun rising on this cold, cold morning (-15 C). The jetway was cold and got us both giggly at finally having some winter to enjoy ourselves instead of just the snow reports are getting from home. Last night, when we got to the Mumbai airport, we submitted our seats again for a bump. We wanted to head for home, but getting another 1200euro and having to spend another day in a nice hotel wasn’t too punishing for us to offer up our seats again. We had a formed a little makeshift family of “stay behinds” and there we all were again, waiting to see what the verdict would be, but then the word came that we were all getting seats. We got our boarding passes and then, without any help from the Mumbai Lufthansa people, we had to beg every line keeper we came to for a cut to the front of the queue in order to actually make our flight. We still needed to go through immigration and security and they had already begun to board our flight. go, go, go (as Cort would say) We had already checked our too heavy, though carry-on sized bags and still needed to send our backpacks and largish bronze statue through the x-ray. We got some typical Indian security men bullsh*t hassle about the statue. (fellow Indian travelers, you knoooow what I am talking about here!) They held us and passed us back and forth between tables and each other, waiting for what, a bribe? I don’t know what it was besides flexing their meager, uniformed muscles before finally sending us to the gate with our statue that was already preapproved and tagged by Lufthansa back at the ticket counter. We got there without much time on the clock, but as we rounded the corner to our gate about 25% of the passengers were still waiting to board too, so no harm after all beside a few minutes of worry and frustrations.

Being in Europe again is great. I am always so impressed with how put together and glamorous most European women are, even as they head to the airport at 8:00am for their own flights. I am having serious shoe envy and feeling a bit self-conscious of our long-worn jeans, trail runners and unwashed faces in this crowd. It is a good thing we are cute enough to hold our own in spite of the state of our clothes (giggle)

Our bags are checked through, so we can relax for the 4 hours between our flights. Luke is working on batching our recent “rolls” of photos---we have some good ones. We are feeling happy and complete as we recall some memories from the trip and talk about picking up milk and tea at the Vitamin Cottage on the way home today. We are making plans to pick our passes at Eldora and head up for some runs tomorrow to see if these lazy legs still work. After being at sea level for so long, I think most of the gain that we had being up above 16,000ft in Tibet for those 3 weeks is likely lost, but we will see soon enough!