Scotland Road Trip! August 2008

Packing and Boston Logan Airport

Today is the day my mom and I are leaving for Scotland for a nineteen day vacation! I took today off of work and I spent it running around like mad!  I dislocated my elbow on August 1^st in an ATV accident so this will be an interesting trip.  I am just out of the Bledsoe brace that I had to wear 24/7 and now my arm is weak and sore and I have to be careful not to lift anything heavy.  Since I usually carry and lift both my luggage and my mom’s this will be a challenge.  I also have a Dynasplint to wear at night to try to stretch my elbow so I can regain full extension.  Elbows are notoriously stiff and it was pretty much bent at 90 degrees at first and didn’t move much.

We made it to Boston's Logan Airport in good time and checked four bags between us and they didn’t even charge us for mom’s overweight bags.  Good deal!  From the Aer Lingus counter we made our way to the security line, which was really long!  The TSA agent made us step out of line to stuff our purses into our backpacks so we would only have 2 carry on bags each.  We told her we would put them in the backpack after we cleared security, but she didn’t care.

Just as I was about to put my bags through scanner at security – a TSA agent escorting four women (one was in a wheelchair) barged in front of me and had all four women go in front of me.  I can understand that the lady in the wheelchair needed assistance, but the others should have had to wait their turn like everyone else.  Especially since they all set off the alarms and took forever.

Then of course my carry on with all my camera gear was chosen to for trace detection, so I had to step aside again and stand in a little box and watch while they swabbed my bag.  The TSA was also concerned about my elbow brace which was in mom’s carry on.  Luckily we had stuck the brace in her bag or the other TSA agent probably would have hassled us about that as an additional item also.  The agent who opened mom’s bag was cool about it – he told her I was probably just trying to get out of carrying heavy stuff on the trip!   :o) 

When we were finally through security, we were still so early that we had hours to wait till boarding time.  Boring!  We decided to get something to eat at the restaurant at the end of the concourse, which coincidentally is the same restaurant that Steve, Alice and I ate at last year when we were heading to Greece .

We had a little trouble getting the camera gear bag in the overhead compartment because of my stupid elbow, but a nice lady ‘volunteered’ her tall husband to put it up there for us.  We had an aisle and a window seat together as the plane was a 2 4 2 seating configuration.  The flight was uneventful until minutes after they served our meal.  Then turbulence struck and kept up for at least an hour.  Bad turbulence – like being in a blender!  I decided to close my eyes and try to sleep. When I woke up the plane was dark, and of course mom was still up reading.  She can’t sleep on planes at all!!!