Travel Day

This morning we woke up at 4AM in order to make our flight! We'd been trying to build up to it and had over the past few days been rising at 4:30, but, aside from some people I know who get up that early because they work in the financial markets (in LA, but dealing with NY time zones), it is difficult to think of another reason for getting up so early. I suspect that some number of us (myself included) used to think that 4AM was an at least occasional bedtime.

Anyway, sob story aside, we got up early!

We'd enlisted our friend Lori Peikoff's help one more time to take us to the airport. The theory here was that while we'd done a dog training session with Cassie at LAX before this was the real thing and we needed help! Check in went fine. From the standpoint of United Airlines and Cassie (the dog!), the thing that took the most time was their verifying what her 'ticket' was going to cost (being anal-retentive, we already knew).

By the way, it doesn't make any sense to us that we had to pay a fare for our dog to travel, in something the size of a gym bag, underneath the seat in front of us....

LAX-Chicago (ORD). Perfectly fine. 4 hours on the plane. We planned for 4 hours on the ground in Chicago for Cassie to 'go outside'. Not clear any other way to take care of what was necessary.... That too worked fine. I have a friend who lives in Chicago, who travels a lot!, who gave us directions on how to get to grassy spots... enough on this...

Chicago-Charles de Gaulle (CDG-Paris). 8 1/4 hour flight plus roughly 2 hours on either side for poor Cassie in the bag. That also worked surprisingly fine! The doggie drugs worked better than expected. On occasion during the flight when it got particularly turbulent or flight attendants were hanging around, we would open her bag and put a hand on her to reassure her. More than anything, I think we were disturbing her when we did so. She seemed resigned to being in the bag, not really happy or unhappy (how Zen!), and welcome of the attention when it surfaced.

(part 2 coming -- arriving at CDG and our first ((very)) jet lagged day)