Africa Trip - Part 1

I'll begin by apologizing for not posting an update sooner. There's so much to write about that I've decided to break it up into smaller chunks that will hopefully be easier to read than one huge post about the whole trip. This first post will be about our flights from Louisville to Africa.

This was my first experience with trans-Atlantic travel, and I can now attest to the fact that jet-lag is a reality. It took me about 3 days to get caught up on my rest over there, and about three days for my sleep patterns to return to normal once we got back.

Our departing trip was a whirlwind. Our flight from Louisville to Chicago was delayed by about 45 minutes, and when we got to O'Hare airport, the crew from our flight to Paris was on the look out for us. Thanks to their assistance in rushing us through security, we barely made our flight. It's about a 7.5 hour flight from Chicago to Paris (8 hours coming back since you're flying into the jet stream). Our plane was a huge airbus that cruised at around 620 MPH at 37,000 feet. Every seat had a built in monitor in the headrest, so we everyone could choose their own movies to watch, which was nice.

I was surprised at our route. I had assumed we would fly in a straight line from Chicago to Paris, but we actually took an arc-shaped route, traveling northeast over Canada, then just off the south coast of Greenland, before turning South over Ireland/England and eventually into Paris. We took the same route coming back. If anyone knows why planes do this, I'd be interested in learning. My guesses are that either (a) they want to stay as close to land as possible in case they need to make an emergency landing; or (b) the fact that the earth is spherical makes this a shorter distance than flying due West. In any case, we landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris at around 8 am Sunday morning and caught another plane to Malaga, Spain.

We touched down in Malaga at around noon and had the unfortunate experience of learning that our luggage hadn't made it. Later, we would learn that it hadn't made it on to the plane in Chicago. Thankfully, everyone had packed extra clothes in their carry-ons, so it wasn't a major disaster. We spent the night in Malaga at a guest house owned by a local church, and made the short flight over to Africa on Monday morning.

to be continued...