Travel+To....

Based upon the last 24 hours, I think it’s fair to say that machines do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to intercontinental transit. Kids these days are so spoiled. When I was a kid, you had to risk scurvy and a //lot// of rope-burn to cross the Atlantic. These days, as a person, you basically sit in your little square and cope with the varying degrees of weirdness that result from a century and a half wherein mechanical evolution far outpaced human adaptation. Anyway, so far so good! The bus trip from New Haven to JFK was really easy, and I met and conversed with several of the doctors, nurses, residents, etc., that I’ll be traveling with for the next eight days. Universally, they are extremely smart and extremely interesting. John Tangredi, an OR Nurse, has been on many similar medical missions in the past, as in several dozen. He is effectively the mastermind behind the logistics of this trip (packing, travel, transportation, etc.). In my conversation with him on the bus, the true degree of challenge that confronts the medical mission became abundantly clear to me. Everything that is the status quo in the daily lives and practices of these medical professionals simply does not exist where they’re going. They either have to bring it with them (instruments, sterilizers, scrubs, sutures, anesthesia, machines, other important things) or do without. This helps explain the fifty-some-odd crates and duffels, which altogether hold several thousand pounds of equipment.

The flight from JFK to Amsterdam was about 6 hours long, and it went by kind of fast. I actually ended up sitting two rows in front of Ann and Giselle Bazos (Zoe’s mom and sister), which was nice because they came for a visit early in the flight, and Giselle adroitly calmed my edgy nerves. She then proceeded to do something that I could not, which was to change into fleece footy pajamas and sleep for five and a half hours. I mostly just sat around feeling weird; maybe dozing and then jolting awake, as is my habit during plane flights. The Boeing 777 is a sweet aircraft, and if you want more details you should talk to Max Levine (8th grade student and air travel enthusiast). Thanks, Max, for your additions to this page in the form of air traffic controller banter and screenshots of my flight’s transit over the North Atlantic!
 * [[image:traveltoone.jpg width="495" height="353" align="left" caption="Step One"]] || [[image:TravelToAmsterdam1.jpg width="448" height="298" caption="Logistics wizard John Tengredi on the right."]] ||  ||
 * [[image:IMG_2933.JPG width="499" height="334" caption="The Boeing 777. World's largest 2 engine aircraft. NBD."]] || [[image:TravelToAmsterdam2.jpg width="463" height="307" caption="Guess what Earth Science sections I teach this year? K,L, and M.  Weird, or Destiny? "]] ||   ||
 * **Taking Off From JFK**




 * Passing Over CT**




 * Passing Over Maine Heading Near Canada**

||




 * Over The Atlantic at 9:00**

**Lyrics** "Ground Controller" Low truck behind you just tell me when your ready. "Pilot" I see cherry oh. "I think he said that at the end" "Ground Controller" KLM Boeing 777 from the left. "A snipit of a controller warning a amercian airline that KLM was coming up to his left" "Pilot" The pilot is asking his approx location for the air controller to see which runway he can take off of. "Ground Controller" KLM Umm 642 Kennedy Ground runway Uh 22 right Ah standby. "Tower Controller" KLM 5 heavy flying 100 contact New York Departure goodnight "Pilot" says his good nights. Lastly a snipit of the tower controller saying take off to the pilot || The flight from Amsterdam > Kigali, Rwanda > Entebbe, Uganda, is quite a bit longer, up into the 9 hour range. I’m using the present tense because I’m actually writing this about 6 hours into the flight, anticipating a brief moment of internet to copy and paste it into the Wiki at some later point. The seats on this plane (an Airbus 330) are jammed pretty tightly, which is definitely noticeable at this stage in the game. A counterbalance to that fact, and something that has proven unique about flying outside of the U.S., is that you get to do things like get up, walk around, and stand in the galley eating cookies, drinking beverages, and playing Scrabble on an iPad with Dr. Jon Black. From there you might also take pictures as the plane crosses the threshold of the African continent. The pilot actually came back to get a cookie while we were hanging out back there. Did I make a bad joke about who was flying the plane? Regrettably, yes. Followed by a question about why we had vectored further east than necessary, apparently to pass into Egyptian rather than Libyan airspace? Also yes.
 * media type="file" key="Mr.L Air Traffic Control Audio.mp3" align="left" width="264" height="22" ||  ||
 * [[image:travelto2.jpg width="394" height="336" align="center" caption="Step Two"]] || [[image:travelto3.jpg width="435" height="316" caption="...And Step Three"]] ||
 * [[image:TravelToEntebbe1.jpg width="448" height="298" caption="Airbus 330. It was okay."]] || [[image:TravelToEntebbe2.jpg width="448" height="298" caption="Looking southwest: the Mediterranean, northwest border of Egypt, and northeast border of Libya."]] ||
 * [[image:TravelToEntebbe3.jpg width="363" height="595" caption="Crossing into the airspace of the African continent. Looking east over the north coast of Egypt.  It's basically desert for a very long time after this."]] || [[image:TravelToEntebbe4.jpg width="576" height="384" caption="Egypt's north coast."]] ||
 * [[image:TravelToEntebbe5.jpg width="491" height="326" caption="A fairly evocative invitation from the generally austere Dutch."]] || [[image:TravelToEntebbe6.jpg width="491" height="326" caption="Cookies and Scrabble over north Africa. Lingenheld heroically prevails to even the Teacher-Doctor series at 1-1."]] ||