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Day 1: Saturday, November 3, 2001

My sister and her husband took us to the Philadelphia Airport. We arrived about 4 hours before the flight was supposed to take off. We checked our luggage in and made our way through the security. I took everything metal out of my pockets that I could think of, but I still set off the metal detector. So they had to use the wand on me. I had forgotten about my belt (the belt is pretty solid), and my wallet set it off. The security person said that the wand will react to the black strips on credit cards. We waited in the lounge of the international terminal. We were to take off at 8:00 p.m., but they didn't start calling for us to line up until after 7:30. And, for a long time, the airline (US Airways) only had one person checking boarding passes and passports. They finally found a second person, and the line went a little faster. We took off at 8:30 p.m.

We found our seats and settled in. I think that "Coach" seating is akin to how sardines feel when they are crammed into that little can. I am not extremely tall, but my knees always end up about to hit the backs of the seats ahead of me. If the person in the next row pushes their seat back, the seat bangs my knee and it feels like they are laying on top of me. Since I don't want to do the same thing to the person behind me, it makes for a very uncomfortable flight. And since we had a full flight and the family ahead of us had children with stomach problems and a mother who wanted to push her seat back as far as she could, the conditions were quickly deteriorating. Brenda suggested that we switch seats, and that helped a lot.

The backs of each seat held a screen (6-7" diagonal). There was a control which began working after we were well enough away from Philadelphia. We had a choice of several movies, TV shows, and kinds of music. I watched "Planet of the Apes," "Dr. Dolittle 2," and "Someone Like You" -- all of which I had not yet seen. I didn't sleep a wink before London.

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