I made it home at last.
The flight back was scheduled to be ten hours long--two hours longer than the flight over, due to headwinds. Storms in the New York metropolitan area delayed our landing. My seatmate was a 9-year-old named Gregory who was fluent in both English and Russian. At one point, he asked if he could plug into the extra headphone jack on my DVD player, and I let him. I was watching The Larry Sanders Show--extremely funny, but probably not exactly age appropriate for a fourth grader in terms of language and subject matter--but the boy lost interest in the program within five minutes and returned to his portable video game.
I breezed through the immigration checkpoint, and so the law of averages dictated my bag was one of the last returned at the carousel, of course. Getting out of the Delta terminal is never a picnic (whoever designed Terminal 3 at J.F.K. should be shot--it's woefully inefficient at handling both pedestrian and vehicular access and egress). Predictably, the Merritt Parkway was slowed to a crawl with late Friday afternoon traffic by the time I reached it.
I am home now, though, and ready to hit the sack.
