As the World Turns.

As I was flying back from Italy yesterday, Brazil had its worst plane crash ever, less than a year after its previous worst crash.

There is plenty of blame to go around.

I am feeling the effects of having traveled through nine time zones yesterday. My sister wanted to leave her son's apartment at 5:30 in Portland, which we did, and we got at my brother's place at 11. The dogs were not at the window to greet me, as I had expected, but when I came through the door, they were glad to see me. They haven't let me out of their sight since.

Yesterday I left the Rome apartment at just before 6 a.m. and took the train to the airport. The plane left Rome at 10:15 and we made it to Frankfurt by about noon. There was hardly no time for a layover, and so I got on the long flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco (about 11 hours, 22 minutes). From Germany the plane went north of the UK and Iceland; across the southern part of Greenland (I took a couple of pictures of it from the plane); north over Hudson Bay in Canada; through Nunavut (which I had never even heard of until I looked it up a little bit ago) and the Northwest Territories; past the northwestern tip of Saskatchewan; through Edmonton, Alberta, and down the rest of the province; then into the U.S. through the northwestern part of Montana and the extreme north of Idaho; then through Spokane, Washington, and down the eastern part of Oregon past Klamath Falls (and a bit to the east of it); over Lassen National Park and through the Sacramento Valley into San Francisco. Four movies played during the trip, but I don't remember much about any of them. The food was very good; in fact, the airline tended to give us too much food.

After landing in San Francisco, we had to go through the Customs Office and reclaim our baggage, which was a pain in the ass, and later we boarded the plane to Portland. The ride was okay, but there were a couple of screaming little kids sitting behind us. It was bad enough they were screaming and crying, but they kept kicking my seat. After we landed, everybody in the back of the plane seemed to be interested in the little kids. The kids, both of them under three years of age, were cute as hell, so I wasn't really mad at them. It was their first plane trip. The parents probably should have provided them with toys to keep them occupied. The good news was they weren't on the Frankfurt-to-San Francisco flight.
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