Surprise! I'm in Iowa!!
The reason? Well, I haven't been home for Thanksgiving since my freshman year of college, which was alarmingly long ago. I've cooked dinner for friends for several years, but this year all of the people I typically celebrate with have either moved away or have made other plans. I could have spent the weekend going to the movies, catching up on 'Lost', and pretending to clean my room, but I decided that it would be fun to surprise my family. I was going to drive home (leaving SF this morning and getting to Iowa late Wednesday night)...but then on a whim yesterday, I looked for last-minute airline tickets and found one that was surprisingly reasonable. This forced me to pack v. quickly since I left California at midnight last night, but I made it here with no problems, and I am staying until Saturday.
You have no idea how unenthused I was about climbing back onto a plane only a month after my extremely long trip home from Sri Lanka. The flight from SF to Minneapolis was uneventful, although it didn't give me enough time to really sleep; the flight from Minneapolis to Des Moines, on the other hand, was a complete joke. The plane was one of those absurdly-small turboprops with about 40 total seats (one on the left side of the aisle and two on the right). It was so loud that my spiffy noise-cancelling headphones had almost no effect on the constant roar of the engines. And, when we got to Des Moines, we found that the plane was too small to pull up to the jetway, so we had to take some rather rickety stairs down to the tarmac. I was *freezing* by this point, since my blood hasn't adjusted to non-tropical weather--but I was happy that they let us walk the ten feet from the stairway to the terminal. If I had been on Indian Airlines, they would have had a shuttle bus to take us to the terminal--and it would have driven in a big quarter-mile circle before pulling up at the door that was only a bus-length away from the airplane. There are advantages to living in America, despite how much I like to complain about the inadequacies of modern human planning.
My parents and my brother picked me up in Des Moines at 8:30am, and we stopped for a traditional steak-and-eggs breakfast on the way home. My brother drove, which was shocking; my father is rather tyrannical about doing all driving himself, so I was stunned at this turn of events. My brother has a great vehicle, though; he got it while I was in India. It's a Chevy Tahoe (v. midwestern), w/leather seats and an mp3 player that is unfortunately replete with all of his country music. He was kind and played some rock music, but the country acted like a blessed anesthetic after about an hour, so I missed some of the drive home.
I spent the rest of the day doing nothing; my mother and I watched some soap operas together, went grocery shopping, and stopped at my grandmother's house to surprise her with the fact that I came home. She seemed extremely happy that I came, so I think the trip will be worth it. I don't have anything else to share at the moment--perhaps I'll get a chance to write more while I'm home, but we shall see.
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