Our wake-up call Friday morning, Sept 28, was at 5am. Adjusting to London time was cruel and unusual punishment. Obbie found the normally busy streets surrealistically deserted as he took a pre-dawn walk to a nearby discount store for some apple juice and bottled water.
A decorative bike rack outside a Walgreen’s on the north side of Chicago.
Since the check-in counter for our flight wasn’t going to open for another twelve hours, we had lots of time to kill. So we drank coffee, lounged around in our room, ate Chinese food, and gazed out over Lake Michigan until three o’clock rolled around. Then we jumped on the “El” for the long ride to the airport.
Bring food to the airport if you’re ever going to fly, because the only food available at the airport is BAD. Most of you know this already.
After grabbing a bit of bad food, we got into a long line to check in. Carry-on bags were limited to 5 kg (though no one ever asked to weigh our carry-on bags), so our packs had to be checked in … and passed through a sophisticated x-ray machine.
We were concerned that this would affect the 20 rolls of film we bought for the trip. They said that this machine would have no effect, but that the machine at the next security check point might be a different story.
After securing our boarding passes, we proceeded to the final security check point. The sign said that “you may request hand inspection of your film.” In spite of the sign, they insisted that EVERYTHING had to be x-rayed. They also insisted that their machine would not ruin our film (yeah, right), and declined to back up that assertion with an iron-clad, money-back guarantee.
The recent 9/11 attacks made us apprehensive about flying between the world’s two busiest airports (O’Hare and Heathrow), but being on Air India made us feel a bit safer. Our plane is less likely to be targeted than one for a US carrier.
Most of our fellow passengers were of Indian origin, and the seats were laid out for people of Indian size. There don’t seem to be many Indians over six feet tall, so the seats were not tall-friendly. After our 747 was launched into the night sky, an attendant passed out little bags of Indian snacks (which were actually quite good), and Obbie was so cramped that he had a hard time reaching his hand to his mouth to insert the snacks into it.
As we leveled off and settled down, our meals were served … Indian food. It was the best airplane food we’ve ever had, and it outshined anything available at either airport by far.