Final Moments in Austria

Everyone woke up this morning pretty eager to get on with the day's activities. We walked across the street to the terminal and got Erica, Paul, Bonnie, Bruce, and Shawn checked into their Northwest flight, which had an on-time departure at 9:45am. I'm flying alone on Delta and have about 2 more hours before my Atlanta flight leaves. It's another 767, which is not the best trans-oceanic aircraft. However right now the online seat map is only about 40% full with no one assigned next to me, so maybe it won't be so bad. The flight is 11 hours total.

Once in Atlanta I've got about 4 hours before my flight to Grand Rapids leaves. I'll have to clear immigration and customs during that layover, which I hear can be a multi-hour ordeal there. If everything is on time my plane should land in Michigan at 10:55pm (a 2 hour flight) and I should be home before midnight (which will feel like 6:00am to me).

Vienna airport is pretty nice, and is a great place to people-watch. Like everywhere else there's a lot of smoking here, but I think I've gotten more used to it. Maybe I'll need to chew Nicorette for a few days when I get back to wean myself off the secondhand smoke. The passport procedures for departure are non-existent - you hand it to them and they stamp it. No questions, 20 seconds max. Here they screen your carry-on luggage (a laptop case and backpack in my case) at your individual gate instead of all together.

There's very little seating near the gates here, so right now I'm in a big room (smoke-filled, of course) tucked back into a corner. My plane starts boarding in 15 minutes, so I guess it's time to go stand over there. I land in Atlanta at 4:55pm (Michigan time), so if I have time there might be one additional update today from there. Then I'll have a wrap-up post or two tomorrow before putting this blog to bed.