Two days until I board the longest plane ride of my life and, technically, the world. The trip from NYC to Cape Town, South Africa is, according to Delta, the longest flight in the world. I am not excited. I went to México three years ago; it was a four hour plane ride, and I almost died with impatience. I am not quite sure how I will make it. Why can’t it be like in the movies where we cut to a short clip of an animated plane traveling from one place to another without actually having to vicariously suffer through the long hours of sitting in the exact same position for 18 hours with less than a centimeter of personal bubble space and bad movies?

Anyway, not anyways (!), we leave Minneapolis on Sunday (this Sunday... eek!) at 9:15 AM and head to Kennedy Airport, where we will land at 12:48. I hope I can make it through this short ride, if I can’t, someone help me, not necessarily god or anything. Then I leave NYC at 3:55 PM and lad exactly at 3:55 PM in Cape town. Although it may seem like I will be traveling for 24 hours, I will in fact be traveling for less grueling number of hours: 19, which is still horrendous. We do get to stop in Dakar. I am not sure if we will actually get to leave the plane, but probably not knowing my luck. Either way time out of the air and on the ground will calm my nerves.

Any ideas on how to quell my anguish on this imminent plane ride? Let me know. I brought my GRE vocabulary flashcards. “Gotta learn them all!,” says Kaplan, all 500 of them, and then I still have others to learn. I also am going to buy/rent Don Quixote; some ungodly number of pages in old “Spanish” Spanish ought to quench my thirst for spending time, or insanity. If all else fails, I think that alcohol is free on international flights, but this is a last resort as when I land it will be 3:55, but with jet lag, my body will feel as if it were 10 am. I will have to wait at least 10 hours until I can go to bed, meaning I will be falling asleep at 12 PM. No worries, I have bought a large bottle of sleeping pills.

This will be tough.

Look at what I am forced to leave behind. Hijole they're cute!