Diary: 4/14/14, Flying To Belgium.

[title type="h5"]Monday, April 14, 2014. Up, Up And Away.[/title] The first thing to greet Mary Ann's eyes this morning was the sight of the dog Susie running free down the driveway. She has found the barrier around the house porous. It is too late to do anything about that now. Mary Ann pooh-poohed me when, a week ago, I said that we ought to test the setup before believing in it. Oh, well. The dogs have survived our absences (with the help of our friends) before, including the six weeks after Katrina. We had to leave earlier than planned. Mary Ann had our New Orleans-to-Atlanta tickets rejiggered to get slightly better seats. That made it impossible to print boarding passes. And it's ultimately an international journey, requiring other advanced check-in rituals. Fortunately, one of the baggage handlers out front recognized me and made our checkin more than worth the tip I gave him. Mary Leigh and The Boy left before we did. They will fly to Newark, then to Naples. We will not see them again until Friday in Rome. Mary Ann is surprisingly calm about this. But our daughter is a savvy, confident traveler who has been to Europe six times. (She's twenty-one. I didn't make my first trip there until twenty-seven.) The Boy has not been to Europe, but he is able-bodied and resourceful. We had to step lively to make our connection for Brussels in Atlanta. Mary Ann, of course, had a plan. She thought that we might be able to score first-class seats with a combination of seat availability and our good story. The first part of this journey will be a re-enactment of some parts of our honeymoon, twenty-five years ago this past February. An incredible deal on a trip to Belgium, replete with attractive package of amenities, led to a magnificent week of wandering around that highly underrated country. That did not cut any ice with the gate attendant, who said that we could upgrade to first, but that it wwould cost $10,000--eight times what we paid in total for our original visit. And this flight is equipped with those luxurious pods MA yearns for.But even she could not in good conscience make that absurd deal. [caption id="attachment_42062" align="alignright" width="360"] Over Ireland at dawn.[/caption]We found the 767 airliner comfortable enough, even to the point of admitting that the food served was edible. The first time around it was much more than that. Those were the days when trans-oceanic dinners aloft were served in courses, with metal knives and forks and wine from bottles. We watched two movies with similar themes. The first had Vince Vaughn discovering that by making frequent contributions to a sperm bank, he was the biological father of hundreds of now-grown children. Many of whom want to meet him, with complications. The second was the true story of a young woman who failed at becoming a nun, got pregnant, lived with the nuns as a slave, then had her child sold from under her. Strange that these both came up on this particular journey for us. We each managed to get about an hour of sleep on the plane, but we were well awake when the first rainbow-like ribbon of color appeared in advance of the sunrise, a few hundred miles shy of Ireland. [title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]