Today (well, yesterday I should say) was a pretty good, solid Sunday of beginning this journey. For the most part, it was spent inside the JFK airport in New York either standing in line sweating like a fiend for an hour at a time or sitting by myself eating $10 sandwiches and coloring wooden frames as gifts for my friends I'll see, but what really made it an excellent day was the very beginning of it back at home. I went to sleep around 3:45am and woke up at 5:00am to get myself ready for the day ahead. (Yup, almost no sleep basically.) Graham and my dad showed up at the house at the exact same time (8am) and we all ate ham/cheese/mushroom omelettes that my dad made everyone for breakfast. Graham was at the house because I'd wanted him to be the one to take me to the airport that day, and of course this would've given me another excuse to have a little more time with him before being Grammy-less for the next 24 days. Graham and I didn't have a lot of time to do much of anything else but drive to the airport since we were short on time, but he still managed to make my entire morning so much better by slipping an incredibly sweet, heartwarming, handwritten surprise of a letter in my hands before parting ways at the security checkpoint. What he wrote was so thoughtful and beautiful, and it was even more so because I hadn't expected it.
It's little things like this that mean more to me than I can describe with words. You just can't beat something taken directly from the depths of the heart.
Anyway, at the security checkpoint, it took me a good 10 minutes to officially stop hugging and saying goodbye to Graham. It was so difficult and painful to imagine how there'd only be about 2-3 free days left for us to spend together by the time I return on August 10th. He will be moving into his college apartment down at Georgia Southern in Statesboro on the 13th, then will start classes again on the 15th. And unfortunately, Statesboro is NOT close to home at all. I'll gladly take 2-3 free days over nothing, but the limited time we have still saddens me.
I have a total of three flights for this itinerary of getting to Düsseldorf - two of which have already been executed. Yesterday morning, I flew from Atlanta to JFK, and now this current flight is JFK to Moscow. The final flight will be Moscow to Düsseldorf, which is sort of a weird route since it takes me longer to actually get to Düsseldorf, but I don't mind too much. The JFK/Moscow flight left about an hour and a half late, so I'm guessing that we will arrive in Moscow sometime close to 12:45pm instead of the original 11:15am. At least that'll mean less waiting for me, which is nice considering I waited several hours for the second flight out of JFK (and considering that it took me more time to figure out how to get on an air train to switch terminals all by myself - that was quite fun).
I'm not tired at all because of the two cups of coffee that I just chowed down (why did I do that at this hour?) but I think I'll end this post here to attempt getting some more sleep since I'd slept so little for the past week or so. Here's for (hopefully!!) another update tonight after I've arrived in Germany and can maybe have a bit more detail and less random fluff to write about.
Gute nacht (okay, maybe there are actually two useful German phrases that I know after all) 😁