Our plane was a 767 Boeing aircraft and someone forgot to tell the people who put the seats in that people have legs and on an eight hour flight it is not a minor issue. The person in front of Teri put her seat back and it was even tighter. We cruised at a speed of about 625 mph at an altitude of 33,000 feet and if it wasn't dark and cloudy we could have seem Greenland Ireland Iceland Scotland Germany and Norway. The sun came up around Norway according to the graphic they had on the TV. It showed a little plane on a map, sometimes it was a small map of New York and the tri state and sometimes it was of half the world.
They showed this graphic for about an hour then they handed out headsets so we could watch the movie 'What happens in Vegas'. Channel one was in Russian, two was in English.
We took off at 9 pm eastern time, we flew toward the sun and tried to sleep until the sun came up about 3 am eastern time and we were somewhere over Norway at the time. Clouds were as thick and high as whip cream on a Sunday in July. I couldn't see anything until we went below the clouds as we went to land in Russia. Then we could see some houses and some cars on the roads.
It was drizzling when we arrived and we departed the plane last. I think we didn't want to face what was ahead of us. I know I was a little scared of facing a country where I didn't speak the language and could not even guess what the signs meant.
After customs we found our driver who had retro-music on his pioneer radio inside his Hyundai on for us. Then the announcer spoke Russian reminding us where we were. The station switched between western music and some Russian music and our drive was very pleasant and helpful, but I don't think he spoke English.
Our drive was a little longer than I expected and the roads were narrow and some of them had potholes. Near the end of our trip we were in a residential area not too thickly populated and I began to wonder if we might have made a mistake. It didn't seem like an area where a hotel would be and I didn't know if maybe we might of gotten into the wrong car and maybe our drive would turn down a dead end street and we would be met by several large men with guns who thought we would be in possession of a large amount of money and were intent on relieving us of it. Before my mind went into overdrive we turned into a short driveway of this villa type place that turned out to be our hotel for the night.
We went to our room slept for several hours had dinner (Chicken Kiev with spinach, it was good, don’t know how much) then went back to our rooms and are about ready for bed. In America it's 4:34 and the Yankee's might of just finished playing. In Moscow it's 12:30 and I'm going to try to go to bed and see how long I will sleep.
