The alarm woke us up at 3am and we didn't have much to do except brush our teeth, freshen up a bit, change clothes and go down to the lobby to wait for our bus. There were a few others that had also signed up for the 3:30am shuttle. The bus came on time and we were dropped off at the airport terminal at 3:45am.
We headed to the Air France counters to drop off our suitcases and noticed that the line was already quite long. Fortunately, the line was moving at a good pace and we had finished dropping off our suitcases in about 30 min We headed towards security/immigration and were done with the formalities in about 15 min. The flight was on time and we had seats in row 17 which was right over the trailing part of the wing (my favorite place!). The flight to Paris was uneventful and smooth. Both Sahana and I slept for the most part since we had woken up at an ungodly hour. The only "meal" they served was some package stuff and there were no vegan options so we politely declined and just had the coffee.
In Paris, we had a roughly 4 hour layover plus there was no need to go through security check one more time, so we had plenty of time to while away at CDG. We couldn't find anything vegan to eat in Pret a Manger or Starbucks, so we bought packet of potato chips and had coffee with chips and a protein bar that Sahana had packed in her carry-on. We weren't feeling super energetic, so we didn't follow our usual practice of walking from one end of the terminal to the other and instead just ended up sitting in one place and browsing/reading/playing on our phones.
The flight to IAD was also on time We were seated in row 32 which was again just at the trailing edge of the wing. The seating arrangement for the 777 was 3-4-3. However, the lady assigned to the seat next to Sahana opted to move to the seat across the aisle so we had the 3 seats to ourselves for the whole flight. About an hour after the flight took off, they served us lunch (or maybe it was dinner, who knows!). We were given our vegan meals and it was surprisingly very yummy. We finished every little morsel, especially because we were quite hungry by then. After that, Sahana alternated between sleep and watching 3 movies while I really couldn't get much sleep. I tried but didn't get deep sleep. I ended up watching 2 episodes of Brooklyn 99, a few episodes of Friends and a movie (The Darjeeling Limited). And, of course, I played some of the games on the plane's entertainment system. There was a golf game that was terrible, and there was Sudoku and some trivia game that I liked.
Towards the end, things got a bit dramatic. Just as we were flying above Boston, the flight experienced quite a lot of turbulence. As is my usual practice, I frequently check the compass app on my phone to see which way we were heading. By my reckoning, we should have been heading Southwest or West. Instead, I was shocked to see that we were heading Northwest and after a few minutes, we were actually heading North, towards Canada. I was confused because the captain hadn't said anything except that there was some turbulence. For the next 30-40 min, we kept flying away from our destination and although I knew that there was probably nothing to worry about, I was mystified by the fact that the captain or the crew were so non-communicative. Finally, the plane started turn towards the West and finally towards the Southwest. We started getting closer to IAD and the weather also started to clear up.
We ended up landing about 10 min late which isn't too bad at all. Armed with our Global Entry card, it took us all of 15 seconds to get through immigration. The guy just asked for our names and said that we could go. It took a while for our luggage to arrive though, so that neutralized some of the advantage we got from our Global Entry card because some of the other passengers caught up with us, I think.
Anyway, we picked up our suitcases and headed to the Uber waiting zone. Our driver came in 5 min and we reached home at around 6:15pm. And, that was the end of our trip to Greece!
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