Since our flight out wasn't until late (after 6 p.m.) on Xmas day, we had lots of time to get ourselves into trouble by planning to do other things that day. Shari's brother Mike arrived around 9 a.m., apparently taking a brief respite from a day of the holiday activities of his girlfriend's family. As promised, Shari cooked a delicious breakfast for all of us: a scrumptious baked thing that according to the recipe was a hybrid between a pancake and an omelette, but which I thought was more like a souffle, served with a heavenly orange-laced whipped cream and fresh raspberries, and some chicken-apple sausages. MMMmmmm!!

After Mike left, we digestive-gassed around for a couple of more hours making last minute decisions about our reading material and carry-on survival supplies for the long flight, getting the last things in the suitcases and closing them up, doing last-minute garbage takeout, and taking care of the cats by preparing a second litter box and making sure they had plenty of water and dry food in the big hopper-type feeder. Shari's landlords had agreed to come by once a day to check on them and feed them their canned food, but we wanted to make sure they would be OK in between times.

Finally, we hauled our suitcases downstairs, loaded them in the car, and made our departure. I had a nagging feeling of having forgotten something, mostly because it was so anticlimactic after all those months of preparing and talking about it to—well, to just toss a suitcase in the trunk, get in the car, and turn the key, as if we were going down the street to the store. The rest of the trip would prove that in fact we hadn't forgotten anything of any significance. I suppose it didn't feel like "time to go" because it wasn't—we were still several hours early, since we had planned every stage of the trip to the airport with plenty of time margin, then added still more margin for good measure.

Good thing, too. We arrived at our planned cheap off-site parking lot in South San Francisco to find it full and not accepting any more cars. So we went to another one, to find that full too. After visiting four different private parking facilities and the airport's own long-term parking and finding them all full, we were just about to go pay for a night at an airport hotel and then not stay there (it's a common practice in San Francisco to pay for a hotel in order to park there, although most people do actually stay at the hotel in the process—It costs about $110 for a room, but they'll let you park there for a week or 10 days, making it only marginally more expensive than parking alone) when we found signs for a no-name off-track parking facility that nobody had ever heard of, located in an unlikely place, which had space. At least they said they had space—when we got in there, there were no spaces to be found. No problem, the attendant said "just put it anywhere," so we parked by the curb in a reasonably out-of-traffic area, and the attendant put out orange cones around the car. I didn't feel too bad about that since we were about the 50th car to do the same thing. Clearly, they consider their state of "full" or "not full" to be a analog value. They gave us a slip with the phone number to call for shuttle pickup when we returned, and we boarded the shuttle bus.

We rode the shuttle to the airport and two laps around the airport until the driver had dropped off everybody else, and came back to ask for the fifth time what airline we were on. It turned out that he didn't speak English well and hadn't been able to understand "British Airways" no matter how many times we told him. This time he gave me a clipboard and asked me to write out the name for him, and then he nodded and said: "London?." That was close enough, so we said yes and on the next lap successfully made it to the international terminal. Still just a little under 2 hours before our flight, and since we lucked out and there were few people flying that day, the lines were short and that was plenty of time.

The remainder of Friday was very uneventful. We passed through security, found our gate, ate some pitiful yet pricey food, and Shari killed some time by making up a torrid storyline for a romantic opera about the hispanic cleaning lady who was working around the gate area, whom we named "Nostrilla" (which was the name of the brand of nasal spray we'd brought to help with the dry air on the plane). Nostrilla's operatic theme song is taken from Bugs Bunny: "Oh, Nostrilla, you're so wuv-wee; yes I know it, I can't help it." The large-bellied hispanic man we saw Nostrilla speaking to was dubbed: "Hector" and declared to be the illicit lover of Nostrilla who is now carrying her illegitimate child. Shari just about got the whole plot outlined. I hope I get to be her agent when she sells the movie rights!

This turned out to be a slightly, if only slightly, more interesting way to kill time than the hundredth repetition of something like: "hey, I have an idea! We're not doing anything else today, Let's go to Paris!".

After what seemed like forever, we boarded our plane. "The Limeys," as we had taken to referring to British Airways, were efficient and on time. The flight was nearly empty, and we had a whole center section of a row to ourselves. Shari stretched out on three seats to sleep, while I slept in the fourth one, and we passed the last hours of Christmas Day about as comfortably as one ever can on an airplane.

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All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.