Sunday, December 19, 2004

My Flight

My husband has given me clearance. Does he like you more now? After three months does he trust you? I'm just not sure.. but I'm am now able to tell you that I have left the country. That's right, I'm in the US. We flew here yesterday. In Paris we waited three hours on the ground, in the plane, because of some problem with the left generator. I think they moved another little used generator in the plane to replace the broken generator on the left. All the women were a bit flipped out about the broken generator information, but the men seemed to think it was no big deal. We did arrive in the US safely so I guess there really was nothing to worry about. Either that or we were lucky.
There were tremendous winds yesterday and the actual flight took 8.5 hours to DC, as a result we were on the plane for 11.5 hours. We had to get a new, later connection from DC after that (we missed our original connection), which ended up being 45 minutes late (they needed to get more gas because of the severe winds). We were supposed to end our trip at 7pm EST, but we actually arrived at 12:15am the next day. What a day of travel with the two kids! Thankfully, they each had or made friends on the long flight.
On the plane, interestingly enough, I read an article how much CO2 we generate when we take an overseas flight. There are a couple of websites which have CO2 calculators to determine how much you generate. At future forests, I found out that yesterday my flight covered 6196 Km and produced 0.68 tons of CO2. The webiste makes suggestions of how I can pay back my debt to the world. For yesterday's consumption, they recommend that I either dedicate 1 tree to make your flight Carbon Neutral or supply 1 energy saving lightbulb to a small community in the developing world. Sounds like a pretty good idea.

-- said Auntie M in Paris
10:16 PM

7 comments

BACK TO MAIN PAGE