Highlights of my trip to CA

I went on a little CA (shopping) trip because I had a ticket that was about to expire.

I left on Oct 3rd.

Here are some highlights of what I did on this trip:

- It was great to see Jan and Estela again, and of course their kids Julian and Camille. I stayed over on the first night of my arrival and we ended up talking till 2am. The next morning we went to see Camille's soccer game - too cute to see her play.

- For the next 4 nights I stayed over at April's house. I was happy to help out a bit in the household (doing laundry - changing drapes - cooking soup and dinner) since she has been through a hard time. It was nice to chat at night and keep her company.

- Let's not forget the shopping, shopping, shopping,....

- I visited the Monticello school to hear the unfortunate news that Trinh's husband David has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. I really hope it's not too wide spread and treatable.

Sometimes I wonder why so often bad things happen to good people...

- I was able to catch up with Becky over Starbucks coffee - we mostly talked about a certain operation I had done (hmm... someone else is interested??) haha...

- It was so great to get together with my old Cisco crew - we had lunch together, lots of talk and ended up going for pearl tea and even coffee. I miss them, it was always a lot of laughter when we were together (and tears but that was mostly because of the managers :)

- On my last night I stayed over again at Jan and Estela's house, again talking till 2am (ouch - it was a working day for them the next day). We all got up at 5:30am (everyone except Camille) and they waved me out ... snif snif....


And then I had to fly back:

- First of all, with two heavy pieces of luggage and one rolling hand luggage, it was really hard to get all of that to the train and to the check-in counter (no carts in sight).

- Then I spend two hours at the check-in counter because it turned out that they charged me too little for my trip (I payed 250 Euro to change the ticket dates, you would think that was enough). I was arguing that you can't change the ticket price on my halfway my trip - that isn't fair. About one minute before boarding time they let me go, so I had to run through the security checkpoints (cutting in line before everyone - giving me mean looks) and barely made it in time to my gate. It's now 9am and I didn't have breakfast.

- Instead of flying to Philadelphia we made a stop at Phoenix where I was supposed to change my ticket (I still didn't have the correct ticket to fly to Brussels). When they took care of that I had to run back to the plane (still didn't eat).

- When we landed in Philadelphia, I asked another passenger what time it was, it was 7:40pm, while my next plane was boarding at 7:45pm. Again I had to run like crazy to make it to that plane. And again I hadn't eaten - I was starving !!

- I must admit: I refuse to buy food in the plane since I really hate the taste of cold soggy bread. Even when extremely hungry, I can't eat that.

- I was pleasantly surprised on the plane to Brussels: I had 3 seats all for myself. I was gonna get some sleep here !!! A girl asked if she could sit on one of those seats, but thinking back to my tough day so far I just said "no - I want to catch some sleep". Awful huh - but she found another seat where there was lots of space.

- I have never enjoyed a pasta more then I did when they served me dinner :)

- I fell asleep after dinner and woke up when they were serving breakfast. PERFECT!

So these were the highlights of my trip....