04 October: New York to Johannesburg

We were up with our alarm at 6am, managed to be showered and out before 7! Lugged our bags to the nearby subway and headed to Howard Beach.

Good news, apparently the Sky Train was working again, although it was offering a slightly slower than usual service, we had to wait for the 3rd one to find one that was In Service. Fine for us since we'd given ourselves so much time before our flight, but there were some pretty annoyed people waiting there with us.

And then it was pretty easy to drop our bags and go thru TSA at Terminal 4. So we hunted down some breakfast. McDonalds was the nearest option and so we had our first (and last) for the trip. We each had a Egg, Bacon & Cheese McGriddle (they have McMuffins, McGriddles & Biscuits ... turns out a McGriddle is like a crumpet ... much better than those awful McMuffins!). And I had a Frappachino :)

The Trucker almost caved when he saw there was a Shake Shack around Gate 35 (or therebouts), but it was quite a bit more expensive than what we'd paid yesterday! He did actually consider getting one to go for on the plane tho o_0 Haha.

And then we wandered, up and down thru all the duty free shops. Almost bought myself a Marc Jacobs miniatures set ... but declined the urge after my bag purchase last night ;)

Eventually it was time to board. 11h15 in New York, 17h15 in Joburg and a 15 hour flight. We got a meal just after we took off, I had the Vegetarian "Spinach" Lasagne (no spinach that I could find) which was nice, but I definitely had order envy over The Trucker's Shepard's Pie.

Unfortunately we didn't get much sleep on this flight, the plane was booked solid so not a seat to spare. I started with The Lone Ranger. It wasn't as terrible as I had been expecting (from what I'd heard), but I'm glad I didn't go to the big screen to see it.

And then I managed to get a few hours of sleep before watching After Earth. Utter rubbish. Seriously, the "Earth" part is like the most irrelevant part of the story. And Will Smith's kid is a bit annoying, to be honest. And then, when the credits played, I realised it was a Midnight Shyamalan ... why did I bother. I did vow to never waste precious hours of my life on this man's continuously deteriorating movie list.

Tried to sleep a little more, and then started watching The Heat, while they served a very average breakfast. I'd actually like to finish watching this one.

We landed on Saturday morning and got thru customs and collected our bags with no trouble. When we unpacked later tho, there was no cable-tie on his zip and the TSA had left a nice little "random inspection" note inside. Pity they'd repacked so badly and some of my Lindt were squashed :(