5h, 21m
That’s how much time is left in the flight according to the interactive globe map on the back of the seat in front of me.
Kyle is in and out of sleep next to me. Either that, or he’s still in a NyQuil drugged state, but either way I’m grateful he’s resting. We had a little “sick” scare a couple days ago when he woke up feeling gross with a low-grade fever, but (thankfully) had the option to push our flight back a day thanks to a snow storm. Decided we’d wait and make the call day-of, but he woke up feeling better with no fever this morning, so we carried on as usual…
Neither of us tend to sleep well on planes, but I’d venture to say he does better of the two of us. I only have so much patience for tying myself into knots trying to get comfortable before it’s not worth it and I’d rather just watch “Singing in the Rain” through delightfully mediocre airplane earbuds (I’m not being sarcastic. I kinda love the silly little earbuds. They’re part of the ✨experience✨). And honestly, the lack of sleep does make it easier to go to bed at a normal bedtime hour in the new place, which helps with adjusting to the time zone. #jetlaghacks
Time itself feels pretend right now. Our plane windows are ones that you change the “tint” on instead of pulling a shade down, so everything is colored a kind of dark hazy blue. It’s 4:30am on the east coast of the US, but 11:30am in Cape Town. We’re somewhere in the middle right now off the west coast of Africa and, thanks to the jetlag prep I do, my body doesn’t really feel like it’s either—just in some nebulous blob of wibbly wobbly timey-wimey stuff. #iykyk
I didn’t intend on writing this on the plane. I planned on writing a “packing list” blog sometime after filming the packing vlog for YouTube this weekend; but when I pulled out my computer to work on my muggle jobs, I saw that we’d lost wifi and opted to record a little “personal story” blog instead. I realized that we’ll only be on this starting-full-time-travel-for-real flight once, and these are the kinds of moments I’ll want to go back and reread one day:
Where were we emotionally/mentally on the day we left for Cape Town?
We’ve been asked some variation of this question repeatedly over the last month, it’s a very fair one considering how far we’ve come to get to this point.
In short, I don’t feel at all like I anticipated I would. No nervousness, not even the weight of our reality. It’s more of a settled and grounded sense of peace. It feels almost casual, normal. We’ve been waiting for it for so long, it’s almost a sense of relief to finally be stepping into it.
The hardest part of this whole thing was still that drive away from Branson; away from our kitty and friends and house… and each goodbye since has been a little bit easier. I think it’s because Branson was our life: it’s where we built our marriage, our home, our skills, our little family, our lives… and all the other goodbyes were of people and places we love but haven’t lived among for nearly 10 years. Visiting friends and family still means staying in guest rooms, so it’s almost like we’ve spent the last month wading into the waters of “nomadic travel,” and this final flight is just the natural progression of that. Not to mention, we’ll also be staying with friends for our first week in SA, so in a way, it feels like a continuation of the last 4 weeks.
But we weren’t always going to start here…one year ago, we came to the sad conclusion that the price point to fly to Cape Town (about $1,200 per person) just wasn’t feasible. We’d initially wanted to start here because of the weather (it’s summer), family friends, and it’s English speaking. So it was disappointing to be honest with ourselves about money and start pivoting our plans.
About a week after this, we volunteered to be bumped from our flight home after visiting Kyle’s family. We had the time to push our trip a day or two and figured it wouldn’t hurt to have some voucher money in our back pocket. I’d volunteered to be bumped for $500/person when we checked in on the app—so I just figured I’d get a text being like “hey, we bumped you, here’s your voucher and new flight ticket for tomorrow.”
Fun fact: even if you volunteer to be bumped via the app, they still need you to show up at the counter and confirm in person.
Since I thought we’d just get a text from them, we walked a few gates down to get coffee and waited. When we got the “your flight is boarding” text, we shrugged our shoulders and started walking back to our gate and just figured they didn’t need us to volunteer anymore.
We were wrong.
When we got to our gate, we heard “we are now offering a $2,000 flight voucher for anyone who is willing to fly to Springfield tomorrow! We cannot leave Richmond until we have two more volunteers agree to change their flight.”
Y’all I wish you could have seen the SPEED with which we ran to the counter.
And that’s the story of how we got TWO $2,000 United Airlines flight vouchers. A total of $4,000 in flight credit with United. One week after we’d realized that Cape Town was going to be beyond our price point.
So we took that as a sign: we were meant to start in Cape Town, SA. We held on to those vouchers for 8 months and in September, sat down and filmed ourselves as we booked two seats on a flight from Washington DC to Cape Town, SA on United Airlines: this very flight that I’m writing this blog from now. And with that…
4h 10m
That’s how much time is left in the flight according to the interactive globe map on the back of the seat in front of me.
And the wifi is back on. <3
-Cat
Wow. Never seen a flight voucher that high.