A North Atlantic Great Circle Crossing
- By Jane Henninger
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- 15 Jul, 2023
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How do you survive a 14 hour crossing of 2 continents and 2 oceans?
Adventure Day2 June 30
The eastbound flight went smoothly enough for an elapsed time of 14 plus hours across 10 time zones. The food was mediocre, conformed to Islamic Hallah dietary standards, and was served with the typical, flimsy plastic utensils. Saudia Airlines needs to take the lessons of Emirate Airlines best practices. allowed us to move without disturbing the other passenger in the outside 3-seat combination.
We arrived in Jeddah at about 10:00 P.M. to clear the Saudi passport/visa section. We had trepidations about customs since we were told we could only bring in a 30 supply of medicines. We carried a year’s supply of each prescription and several over the counter medicines. Some of these would be quite expensive to replace, if confiscated. We got our luggage with only one bag identified for special screening, which was passed immediately by the custom's officials as we breezed through. Phew!
We were not allowed to pre-arrange transportation to our hotel, but a nice gentleman offered to help, saying he would charge us 150 rials ($50) for a ride to our hotel. It was a pretty good journey, but when we got to the hotel he said it would be 250 Rial ($65). He knew which hotel and how much luggage we had when he gave the earlier offer, so we gave him 200 Rial ($58). I’m afraid we took an unauthorized taxi; so we will be more careful in the future. Lesson learned.
The hotel, the Address AlHamra, appeared to match its 4 stars rating. Now past midnight so we went right to bed.
Made it through day 2 of our adventure.
A composite of several encounters in our first 6 months of this yearlong adventure.
Therefore, we are changing out postings to almost exclusively show photographic images with short captions while seeking to post more days to make up for our almost 2 month backlog.
For those wishing to view narratives, please, friend and/or follow Jane on Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/jane.henninger
I had bought a birthday card for him that I actually knew where it was and had it for the trip, but it was about camping and it was supposed to be when were in New Zealand or Australia. I bought it a good year before the trip. At least I had a card for him.
Today we are taking a Thai cooking class at a farm where they grow some of the produce. We are going to a market before to learn what the local products are. Don loves taking pictures at markets so this will be a good start to his day.
After our now standard noodle breakfast, we engaged a local taxi driver to take us outside the ancient city walls with their protective moat to both Wat Umong, the Tunnel Temple, and Wat Sri Suphan, the Silver Temple. After breakfast there were two other Wats I wanted to see. One was the silver wat and the other was outside the old city in caves on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. We got a cab to take us to the cave one and had him wait so he could take us to the one in town.
We cleaned up after playing with the elephants in the river and went to check out several local Buddhist Temples of interest.
On the way back to the hotel yesterday, July 20th, we had discovered Wat Inthakhin Sadue Muang almost in the middle of the street, but Don had been too tired to appreciate it and he did not take any pictures, then.
