It took one entire day of travel to reach the Canary Islands. My plane was to leave LAX sometime after eight a.m. At 4:15 a.m. I get a call from US Airways that my flight has been delayed 100 minutes and that they will make alternative arrangements instead. I am very grateful. After hours at the airport, I end up leaving LAX at 7:10 p.m. on Lufthansa. I arrive at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands at 1 a.m. two calendar days later, so exhausted I can barely stand.
My one thought is that if the Bush administration really wanted to interrogate putative ” hard” suspects, they need not have bothered with the methods they actually used to “soften” them up. They could have just taken suspects, deprived them of their water bottles, made them sit for hours on hard plastic chairs at LAX, and then put them on planes to Europe where, calendar days and two connecting flights later, the arriving suspects, dehydrated, jet-lagged, and sleep-deprived, would have confessed to anything.
The romance of travel simply isn’t what it once was, that’s for sure!
Scientist, conservationist, educator: for almost four decades Dr. Biruté Mary Galdikas has studied and worked closely with the orangutans of Indonesian Borneo in their natural habitat, and is today the world’s foremost authority on the orangutan.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:08 am
Wow! You finally made it! I hope the conference goes amazingly!
Tell us about it!