On my way to Thailand. Drinking a Guinness in London

The initial leg of my journey has already had minor turbulence. When I arrived at the Cleveland Hopkins airport check in, after having wished my parents a tearful goodbye, I learned that my first flight to New York had been canceled due to high winds. The hurricane in the Carribean was disrupting air traffic at JFK.

But not to worry, I was originally going to have a ten hour layover at JFK so there was plenty of time to get me there. American Airlines stuck me on a flight to Washington DC. I could see the Washington monument and the capital when we landed.

I was to connect on another flight to JFK from there. I'd get there with three hours to spare.

That didn't happen. That flight was delayed, and they didn't know how long it was going to be delayed. If we had concerns we were to wait in line at the customer service desk. I waited in the long line. I found out that they recommended I just stick to that flight because I was going to get there with a half hour to spare. Alrighty.

That didn't happen either. I arrived with minutes to spare, ran across the airport thinking I had time because the info screen said the flight was leaving at 10 and it was only 950. I arrived at the gate to find the Qatar airline employees preparing to shut their gate down for the night. The plane had just closed moments before. They'd been looking for me. I wasn't there, until moments too late. But not to worry, the Qatar employee directed me to the American Airlines customer service desk where they were to put me on another flight.

One woman was at the desk. She reminded me of Mila Kunis in a bad way, a pretty young woman who couln't be bothered with your problems because she was about to get off of work, and her life was so hard. If my life was a cartoon, she would have been filing her nails while speaking to me. She had an attitude that indicated my missed connection was going to be my problem at every turn. I had separate ticket numbers, or something- "If you have separate tickets, there's nothing I can do for you." She examined them further and did not understand why the numbers were different. She called the help desk, she didn't know what she was doing, and she didn't care to know. Why was everyone always coming to her with their problems at the airport customer service desk? It was so unfair, her life.

My blood pressure was rising the more I stood on the other side of that desk. I was in that space you go into where you are trying to remain calm, yet flabbergasted by the nonchalant incompetence, mentally composing a "I'd like to speak with someone above you" speech, and formulating how you were going to stay calm when she resisted this.

That didn't happen. I was saved. Another woman who had an air of having more experience appeared. It was time for miss "I broke a nail, carry me to my car" to go home. Her shift was over. The new employee, Allison, went into problem solving mode. At one point she was on two computers and two phones at once, one phone on each ear. I wanted to hug her. It was like a bad actor in a play getting replaced by Meryl Streep in community theatre for the night. "Isabel Incompetent is unavailable this evening so the role of Blanche will be played by Meryl Streep in our Brunswick, Ohio community theatre production of a Streetcar Named Desire." That was how different it was.

Wonder Woman Allison got me on a British Airways flight to London Heathrow and onto my destination of Bangkok. She walk/ran me to the gate to check me in and get on the plane before it took off.

Here's me hurriedly following my hero to my new gate.

I slept most of the way to London and watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 on the totally awesome plane. I don't know if it's a common thing when flying international, but one of the drink choices alongside soda, water, coffee, tea, was white or red wine. I'll let you guess which I chose.

It's cloudy, like I would expect London to be. Heathrow is a giant airport, it's an airport slash mall, actually. I have four hours to pass, and I'm drinking a Guinness at the bar. It's supposed to be better here, but I find it less smooth, less tasty. Maybe it would taste better if I were in a pub instead of an airport. If I had to say what it tastes like, I'd say it tastes like ADVENTURE!!!! (So I got the wine and you, the reader, got the cheese, haha)