Our vacation began on an ominous note -- Grandma Anne coughed all the way into L.A. from Rancho Mirage, and Julie sniffled and sneezed all night before our flight.  I lay in the next bed in our hotel room near LAX knowing without a doubt that I was next.  It was merely a matter of when.

We checked into the airport hotel after midnight and had to be up by 5:00am for an 8:00am flight to Newark Airport.  I’m pretty certain I fell asleep around 2:00am thinking that I should probably not even bother to go to sleep because I had to be up and dressed in three hours.

I woke up at 5:00am feeling that gritty feeling of only having slept a couple of hours.  I immediately swallowed a handful of Echinacea pills, hoping to stave off the inevitable, but with so little sleep, I knew I was on borrowed healthy time.

The deal Julie and I made was that we would take only carry-on luggage.  A 22" suitcase on rollers for me, and one for her.  She had a backpack and so did I.  I cheated and also had a duffle bag (which I filled so full I couldn’t really carry it.  After a while it felt too heavy even to roll it on top of my rolling suitcase, so Julie rolled it with hers -- I mean, what are daughters for anyway?).

We found our seats aboard our 767 aircraft and low-and-behold, we were in first class seats.  There were only ten of them on the plane.  The seats were barrel shaped with their own little locker where the seat back would be for the row in front, except these were so far away we actually had to undo our seat belts and walk to the magazines, etc.  Needless to say, we loved the five hour plus flight to Newark.

This is a picture of my feet stretched straight out in front of me.  Although it's hard to get a really good idea of how much room there is between my feet and the magazine cabinet in front of me, let me just say that there was about another foot of space between them!

In Newark we made our last cell phone calls and put my phone to bed for the remainder of our trip.  You have no idea how dependent we all are on these little wonders, and it was so traumatic to shut it off!  

Before boarding the flight to London, I took out all my pills (especially my sleeping pill), and prepared for a few hours of sleep, hoping to build up my immune system, even while knowing it was futile (Julie was getting sicker by the minute and we were going to be sitting next to each other for the next nine hours).  While I was doing this, Julie was searching the airport shops for tissues and cold medicine.  Although she had brought an entire box of Kleenex with her from L.A., she was worried it might not last until London.  Luckily, she was able to find some cheap stuff that would hopefully last until we could find better stuff in London.

Our business class seats were a come-down from the first class seats, but not so bad that we were unhappy.  I didn’t even notice what happened, because I took my pill and went to never-never land in record time.  I can’t even recall if I ate or not.  I probably did.

The landing was very difficult for Julie -- her ears clogged up completely and made her almost deaf for most of our day in London.