After a month of traveling, I’m finally home.  I loved visiting friends and (most) family, but that first view of my town’s peaks from the shuttle was like the end of Gone with the Wind.  I don’t want to go anywhere for a long, long time.

The flight back was migraine-miserable, but otherwise pretty good.  I have nothing bad to say about Continental.  The seats were much comfier than any I’ve ever been in (except maybe for a short Korean Air flight I was on years ago), and I was pleased to discover that Continental still feeds passengers.  Food goes a long way towards mollifying me.

My previous flights this trip were not so good.

Frontier/Midwest tried to win me over with freshly baked cookies, but two cookies is not enough to make me forget them losing my poster (temporarily) and having a one hour line at check-in.

US Airways was the worst.  The flight was delayed over two hours, causing me to miss a connection in Charlotte.  They wanted me to stay in the Charlotte airport overnight (no free meals or hotel) and get a flight at 11 the next morning to Raleigh/Durham.  Luckily, I had a relative willing to drive 100 miles to Charlotte that night to fetch me and to ferry me to my grandmother’s house near Raleigh/Durham the next morning.  I still had to fight with US Airways just to get them to start the paperwork for a refund on missed leg of my flight.  They also made things more confusing for passengers by listing the flight as “on time” until over an hour after the original scheduled departure – even though they knew the plane was severely delayed at least two hours prior.  Too bad the US doesn’t have laws like Europe…

I still have to tell you about my what I did in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, but right now I’m going to open all the packages that came while I was gone and eat food from my own fridge and sleep in my own bed.

I am so glad to be home!