Eight Days, Eight Flights

It has been a year of planes. I worked out that I’ve been to nine different states in the last 12 months (TN, CA, GA, SC, IL, KY, OH, MO, and NY).

My Thanksgiving was planned around limited travel. A jaunt back up to KY to spend the week with Tammy and Robert, cooking a fusion holiday dinner spanning both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (which basically would have meant adding roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings, but surely that’s good enough!). A few days there and then back to Durham.

The call came while I was waiting for a connecting flight in National Airport. My dad had had a heart attack. Thankfully, he was at school, and the ambulance managed to get him to the hospital within 6 minutes (which, if you know anything about Oxford traffic on a Friday afternoon, is something of a miracle in itself). My mum and my sister had just come back from the hospital.

I forgot what airport I was in, confusing everybody by mixing up Dulles and National and then assuming that Cincinnati International Airport would have a flight to the UK. In the end, I flew on eight different planes in eight days.

And I only broke down once, when my iPhone decided it was going to be helpful and play ‘Tank Park Salute’ after I had got out of the shower in Kentucky.

Dad is…okay. I helped put things together for the Christmas lights, got last in the John Radcliffe with mum picking Dad up, went shopping in Bicester’s new big Tesco, got threatened with menaces by Bonnie multiple times, and then came back on Friday. In some ways, it was like a (compressed) normal trip, but…it wasn’t.

I’ll be back home in three weeks for a more traditional Christmas visit. And a reminder that every one counts.