Belgium - Day 1: Departure, July 5, 2018

Another month, another trip! This time, it’s only the two of us. And this time, it’s all vacation for me, but not my husband K. The reason for the trip is for him to attend and perform at this year’s international ClarinetFest, which is being held in Oostende, Belgium. It actually begins tomorrow, but he had a 4th of July performance. So, we leave today.
When he was trying to get tickets for this trip, he was having a terrible time getting flights to work to go to Brussels.We already knew from the Baltic cruise, that there is a direct flight to Amsterdam. It was not cheap. However, I had a good number of miles stored up with Delta. So, we used most of those to make my flight free. Since the ClarinetFest was here 19 years ago, and the daughters and I had gone then and really seen the town, I offered to save even more money by staying home. But, he wanted my company and wanted me at his two performances, so that was that.
I could not do my usual work at changing my body clock, because of the 4th of July concert. So, it was very much a matter of being up as late as usual, which was after 12. I got up at 7:50 to walk to water aerobics. The rest of the day was spent finishing our preparations.
A colleague of K’s picked us up at 4 pm and had us to OIA by 4:40. I was perturbed/concerned, because when I checked in for the flight last night on the Delta app, it did not show that I had my TSA Precheck. It also did not appear on my printed boarding pass today. I was most anxious to reprint it at the airport. Happily, it now appeared. Why does it happen so often, that it does not show up on any boarding pass except the one printed at the airport? I paid good money for it and it should always be there.
We had no trouble with weight this time. My bag was the heaviest at just 37 pounds. We were finished checking the bags at 4:46. The TSA Pre guy had no one in line! It was amazing. K had some extra scanning, but we were finished there at 4:55 and headed out to Gate 71, which we reached at 5.
We got a fair amount of reading done, because we didn’t board DL 126 until 7. Seats 34F and G were ours for the night.

The plane pushed back at 7:37 and as soon as they enabled the entertainment system, I chose my movie, “The Death of Stalin”, which was by turns funny and horrifying. Take off was at 7:51. K normally tries to go to sleep right away, but he didn’t feel even close to sleepy. So, he was awake, when they brought wine- he had red and I had white, water and a snack. After his wine, even though they were starting dinner, he put on his eye mask, put in his earplugs, and that was it.
I chose rosemary chicken and continued my movie. The chicken was a little dry, but the meal wasn’t bad.

After my movie, I chose songs for my playlist to “sleep” by. It was most aggravating, that there was no way to just make it play. After each song, you had to tap on the next one to get it to play. What a waste! There no longer are music channels,either.
So, if I was awake at the end of a song, I’d start another. Dead silence did not seem to wake me, which was good, but I didn’t sleep well. Once again, there was a guy behind me driving me nuts. This one kept banging into the back of my seat. At one point, he was standing in the aisle, and I turned and told him to please stop.
Every time I got up to go to the restroom, I was amazed/ aggravated to see how many people could sleep. Sigh. If only I could!