Paris to Houston

We would have taken off right on time from Paris at 10:30 am except they held the plane for 45 minutes for two late passengers.  The pilot assured us that he could still get us to Houston on schedule. As usual, Air France is going to shine when it comes to cuisine.  I just got the menu for the first meal on this 10 hour flight. We started with a vegetable salad followed by either chicken in a carrot cream sause, vegetable julienne and mashed potatoes with cheese or salmon fagottini pasta, fennel cream sauce with lemon. Dessert will be Camembert cheese, Clementine and a brownie. Wow! My clothes have shrunken on this trip or I've gained weight.  We were well fed on all of our travels and had big breakfasts and we were invited to dinner or took friends out every day. I'm afraid to hit the scales.

I plan to get some more sleep after lunch, since I didn't do real well in that department on the first flight. I need to be fresh for gathering up all of our belongings at the airport and for the drive home this evening.

We have had lunch and the chicken was excellent.  After the brownie, I ate the miniature orange that was a surprise on my tray. A great way to wash down the meal. If everything else is equal, I'll fly Air France, KLM and Kenya Airways for their food and good service.  Our only option for direct flights from Austin to London to Nairobi so far is the partnership of British Air and American Airlines.  We always weigh that convenience against lower costs through Houston or Dallas. This time, we were able to get $768 on Air France by booking early versus $12-1500 from Austin.  That's a big difference,  even after gas and long term parking is added.

We are now less than 4 hours from Houston as I write this portion of this post and are approaching Montreal.   The cabin crew has just served everyone an ice cream bar, probably the last thing I need but I'll return to my usual eating and exercise habits once I get back to Austin.  Heck, I might be tempted to stop for Blue Bell when we get to Brenham!  I expect we'll have one more meal before the end of the flight.

I was right!  They served a pizza wrap about an hour and a half before we got to Houston.  It came with a fruit salad and some soupy cheese in a container.  I had a cup of coffee to begin perking up before our plane arrived within about 5 minutes of being on time.  We were all in the back of the plane, an Airbus A-330, so it took a while to deplane.  We went through immigration in about 15 minutes and went down to the baggage claim area.  The footlockers arrived fairly quickly, but some checked luggage took a while.  Once we had retrieved all of our clinic and personal baggage, we proceeded to get into the very long line for Immigration.  Even though I tried to lead the way, the agent started questioning Robert about his footlockers.  Before we knew it, we were all herded into another room for an X-RAY scan of all of our bags and footlockers.  I explained what we do in Kenya and they asked me how much they paid me to do this.  I told them we're volunteers but the rewards are eternal and they waved us through after a quick look at the rest of the team's items.