After a sleepless night, I watched the red sun rise over Bucharest from the back of the cab. Whether it was the late night tea, the anxiety of sleeping through an alarm, or the lingering jet lag, there was no more than a short nap to be had during the wee hours of the morning. Despite the resulting sleepy stupor, I have stumbled my way through another foreign airport and am now enroute to another strange place.
A little over three months ago, I sat on a small Airbus with my nose pressed up against the window, watching as the plane left behind the eternal daylight of my austral summer in the Antarctic and slid into the darkness. A line in the sky between the haze of twilight and the deep cerulean of night was nearly as pronounced as the one on the flight path screen that showed a pixelated white airplane icon crossing from the light half of the planet onto the dark. Somewhere below the Queen Victoria Range stretched farther and farther behind me. Since then there has been what seems like a constant parade of airplanes and airports. After a blissful month of hiking and road tripping around the South Island of New Zealand, I skipped through Cincinnati hugging nieces and nephews and grandmothers, then mosied only slightly longer through Chicago gossiping with a sister and wrassling a different niece & nephew pair. Since then there's been Washington DC, Chicago the sequel, rural Illinois, Sacramento, and Lake Tahoe. I have not spent more than 8 or 9 nights in the same place since I left Antarctica on February 3, and nor will I until the end of June. Aside from the bouts of laundry in between, it has hardly been worth it to unpack.
Now it is the Carpathian Mountains that pass beneath me unseen, blanketed by a thick cloud cover. I had hoped for glimpses of peaks, maybe even the monasteries and castles tucked in their valleys, but alas it is only cotton candy I see. The obstruction lets me off the hook and I sink into the narrow seat and close my eyes, no longer fighting the weight of my eyelids. In another hour I will land in Prague, a geographically bizarre layover on my flight path from Bucharest to Dubrovnik.
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