Zen Laundry Master

Three people on vacation for 10 days can generate a lot of laundry, as observed here. Our trip home was uneventful, which is really the first choice of international travellers, in my humble opinion.

We left the hotel at 6:30 am for a 9:30 flight. Things were pretty quiet out there on the streets and I had checked us in on line the day before, so we had plenty of leisure time at the airport before it was time to take off. An airport breakfast and cup of tea kept us all pretty mellow. We acknowledged the fact that 2009 finally came to the west coast right before we got on the plane, and then we were off.

The flight from Paris to London is an hour at best, so we had a bit of time to cruise Heathrow airport. This is a pretty big and impressive airport, particularly terminal 5, but this was the 4th time in 8 months that Holly and I had been there, so we were admittedly a bit non-plussed by the whole thing. Our eyes were on the prize: getting through the 11-hour flight home.

I confess to feeling a sense of, "we are never going to get off of this thing" while sitting on the plane when I saw that there were still 8-1/2 hours to go. Remember, I flew the fabulous 55-min flight from Burbank to Oakland for years. Anything past 2 hours really taxes my attention span!

By the time we landed, deplaned, got our bags, cleared customs and rode the shuttle home, it was about 7:30 pm. Having come back through several time zones since we woke up, I think that we had been travelling for something like 22 hours. We managed to sit around bleary-eyed for a couple of hours and then went to bed in hopes of sleeping straight through and shifting smoothly back to pacific standard time.

We did pretty well, waking up sometime around 5 and getting up by about 5:30. I knew that we had 3 suitcases full of dirty laundry and I was determined to get a handle on it. It always looks a bit overwhelming when heaped up in the living room, but once I got it sorted and started running the different loads, things were moving along nicely.

I am a laundry lover, I think that it is rather therapeutic to sort, wash and fold everything. It gives a nice sense of order to things. David and Holly gladly let me have my zen moments, they just think that I am crazy.