My wake-up call from Arizona arrived an hour early, which is keeping with my 5-week tradition of not getting enough sleep. Showered and packed before Klaus offered me breakfast of Brötchen and Marmelade, and I was ready to tackle some photo prep duties to ensure I’d have plenty of material to write about during my 16 hours of traveling. By 10:00 a.m. I’m on my short walk to Zeilweg to jump on the train to Hauptwache with a connection to Hauptbahnhof before a third train takes me to the Flughafen.

I presented my negative results of the COVID test I took on Saturday, my boarding pass and passport, and found myself in the second group to board after parents traveling with children and those in need of assistance. This is my last photograph of Frankfurt before we return for a briefer 21-day stay near the middle of September. With only 7 hours 41 minutes of daylight during the deepest winter, I’d like to get us back into Europe before we have to endure 16 hour nights.

I suppose I should describe my place in business class that is likely ruining my future international flying experiences. Of course, the seat is amazing, and without a flight neighbor, I believe I have space typically occupied by three people. The seat allows me to lay flat though I was more comfortable with the seat about 75% of the way down for my nap. Our first meal came on pretty quickly after takeoff and was our main meal of the flight. I opted for the burrata, tomato, arugula, and pesto for my appetizer and a braised steak with tagliatelle and creamed spinach for the main course. The dessert was a cherry and chocolate gelato. By the time I get to my third cup of coffee, another steward is asking those of us who are awake if we’d like a Mini Magnum bar. Diabetes be damned, I’m flying business!

Seeing I have the menu here at my seat, I’ll also share that prior to landing, we’ll have a final meal. While I’ll be opting for the vegetable ravioli on rape blossom stew with melted tomatoes and hazelnut stock, the smoked tuna with avocado, mango, papaya, and edamame, on sushi rice with sriracha mayo is tempting. Dessert for that meal is fixed with no alternatives, so we’ll all have a chia pudding with fresh fruit. Oh, I forgot to mention that the first round of drinks on offer came with a porcelain ramekin of roasted almonds.

Some of the above is out of sequence because it fits up there, and well, it just works better for me. This photo is of us still not at altitude as we were still heading north somewhere over Germany in a place I can’t quite figure out.

Farms and villages were separated by stands of forests as far as the eye could see.

We are as high as we’ll get on this flight, and I don’t mean as much as the two priests in the center two seats must be after three glasses of wine. Yes, I was keeping track, and both of them have had to be reminded multiple times to pull their masks up. I suppose God will absolve them of their sins.

It’s been three hours since we left Frankfurt, so it’s 4:40 in the afternoon. In Denver, where we’re headed, it is 7:40 in the morning. Here on the plane, the majority of people are asleep. Did Lufthansa put Ambien in everyone else’s meal? As for me? I’m busy writing about yesterday and my trip to Worms and Karlsruhe. In another tab, I have the makings of an entry with 34 photos so far, one for each day I was in Germany, which was set up in case I ran out of things to write in this entry and yesterday. This doesn’t seem very likely.

My mask has to be on at all times that I’m not eating or drinking, and the warm, humid breath is making me tired, or the collective nap is emanating sleep vibes, making me drowsy. My hope is that I can beat jetlag if I stay awake because when I get home after 9:00 p.m., I’ll be so tired I’ll sleep until morning.

An hour later my eyes have closed a few times with fingers that have grown heavy. I snap back awake from my micro-nap to see a “j” duplicated 50 times across the screen or a “k” streaming along. Mine is the only window open, and the blinding white tops of diffuse clouds are doing nothing to snap my pineal into shape or choke off the melatonin that’s whispering sweet nothings to my eyelids. I want to give in, but also don’t want to nap for more than 30 minutes. Those around me have been in their state of slumber for at least two hours already. I cannot suffer their fate.

But suffer, I did. My 30-minute nap worked perfectly, so I was going to add 30 minutes, but 15 of those into that segment, one of the air-stewards reached over me and closed my shade with the change in light and sound, taking me out of my sweet fever dream on the sunny hot side of the plane. I do feel refreshed and ready to take on this weird place between time zones.

I just realized that this flying arrangement is allowing me to drink more than on any previous flight as it’s not a painful hassle to squeeze myself out of a seat where the person in front of me knows I’m getting out as I have to pull on the seat and bump into it as I attempt to extract myself through the seven-inch slice of space we are afforded in economy that’s been filled with 44 inches of fat. I’m liberated to pee to my heart’s content, my bladder’s too.

I just checked on my connecting flight in Denver and wonder who booked this. A four-hour layover? Really? Why didn’t I look to another carrier that had an earlier flight? That sounds like such a great idea I’m looking right now if I can get a ticket for a reasonable price this late in the day. Jeez, everywhere else on the internet works fine. Try going to a competitor airline, and it’s taking forever to render pages. Well, $450 nixes that idea.

I hear activity in the kitchen. We better get this last meal out of the way because I’m kind of enjoying this feeling that we are eating non-stop, and who knows what snack might follow before landing. Speaking of landing, we are about 3.5 hours away from doing just that in Denver where I can start my 4-hour hanging out in a terminal and will probably pass out.

Damn it. It was probably the two ice creams and three coffees, but I’m feeling that telltale sense of pressure that could indicate I might have to consider the unthinkable: a bowel movement at 35,000 feet. This can’t happen; this has never happened. I won’t let it happen. What deep PTSD-inflicted trauma happened in my early Catholic upbringing that brought shame to this very natural near-daily act of evacuating the shit sock? Ah, remember that reference from my book about the Grand Canyon? Yeah, you probably don’t, as why would you?

So what club did I just join exactly? Really, John, you didn’t take a selfie in there? I’ve got to say that a business class toilet isn’t in demand as much as those in economy and it’s maintained a lot better, even after 7 hours in flight.

I’m done. We’ve not eaten yet, I pooped, no crying kids in business class, but I’m done. I’m ready to land, ready to get to Phoenix, ready to hug Caroline. Hmm, I’ll probably have to shower soon after hugging her as after a month away eating a different diet and using different soaps, I’m going to smell strange.

Something to snack on or eat needs to happen; I’m bored. The computer is open, but my brain is in a funk. I have all these creative tools at my disposal, but I get stuck staring at the blank space ahead of the last word I wrote, and compulsively, I feel I have to keep pounding the keys. Too bad I’m not a poet, I could use the empty bottle of water and vast legroom to write something about the contrast if there even was something to be found using those things as subject matter.

The young skinny priest just started his fourth glass of vino. There must be something better to do on this plane than keeping score of a couple of drunken men from the clergy.

I guess I was wrong about kitchen sounds, as it’s an hour later, and the stewards are nowhere to be seen. Skinny priest is going to hell, he’s without a mask, and I’m not going to forgive him his sins for this shit. I’m putting in a smote order after I’m done typing this.

Maybe I should have gotten a bit more sleep as I’m not due home for another 9 hours; that’s 6:30 in the morning back in Germany, which would mean I’ve gotten 45 minutes of sleep in the intervening 25 hours of being in motion. Sleeping at the Denver airport doesn’t sound all that smart, but then again, I could have Caroline call and wake me so I don’t miss my connecting flight. This seems like a small price to pay for the opportunity to lay down so many words from so high up in the sky. It’s not like I spend every day some five miles over the earth writing, though admittedly, I can’t say that anything I’ve noted here has any exceptional insight that would allow me to claim influence from being aloft.

We’ve been flying over the Canadian Shield, also known as the Laurentian Plateau, for quite some time. I never fail to be amazed by this vast, flat gargantuan stretch of land with a million small bodies of water spotting the landscape. There are nearly a dozen fires burning away down on what I’d imagine is tundra, probably from lightning strikes, as there are no roads anywhere out here.

Looking up information about the shield, I see that I’m looking down on the North American Craton known as Laurentia. This body of land once had the tallest mountains on earth, but glaciers and erosion have worn this land nearly flat, and it’s old, coming in at about 3.96 billion years of age.

I have no complaints about the meal served to me; it was one of the best, if not the best, meal I’ve had on a plane. It was better than my previous meal of the day. So, is business class worth the extra expense? The toilet, meals, and service are certainly pluses. The table and all the space I could possibly want in front of me and for elbows within the seat have allowed me to write comfortably all day. Maybe if I’d slept more, I could better appreciate the seats that allow passengers to lay down, heck I even have my CPAP with me, I could have had seriously proper sleep. My butt still hurts, and I want to walk around, but that’s a small price considering the convenience of getting on first and not competing for overhead bin space along with the aforementioned benefits, so I’d be inclined to say, yes, it’s worth it. Will I do it again? Depends on the price differential when Caroline and I return to Europe in about ten weeks.

I never tire of looking down on our earth from up here. I can’t understand how everyone else in this section watched videos for the previous 8.5 hours or slept when those with window seats had these amazing live views of their planet. I may never get to space, but the view from up here isn’t bad, either. I’m astonished that this is my life: one day, I’m riding a bike 80km along the world’s largest mudflat, taking in an art exhibit on another, and the next, I’m in the sky, connected to the world of knowledge, dining on hot food at 35,000 feet.

We are somewhere over South Dakota, and the clouds over North America always look so much more defined and billowy than what I see over the skies of Europe. The land out my window is still flat, but I anticipate seeing mountains at any time. I remain on the lookout.

We’ve reached Colorado and are approaching Denver.

Well, here I am in Denver with 90 minutes to go before I board the next plane to Arizona. Customs was a breeze, and my $14 brisket sandwich wasn’t horrible. I hope it lasts me the rest of the night. I’m sleepy beyond belief and I’m certain I’ll pass out on my way home. Somehow, I’m pretty chilled out; it’s often happened that I feel assaulted by America when I hit the airport; maybe the extra room in business class alleviated a good amount of stress? Seems like I’m done writing for the day, time to exit this non-stop blogging.