Debarking is always a strange and complicated process. There are always a billion things you have to do, and sometimes you have no real help doing them. When you’ve debarked enough times, you fall into the routine naturally. Go to medical, pick up files, go to crew office drop off files, spend at least an hour sitting in cabin waiting for the call to immigration…walk through a line up that feels a mile long, hand the custom’s agent your passport…
And that’s it.
One minute you’re home…the next minute you’re standing shore-side in a strange city (even if it’s a city like Vancouver, which I sort of know) either boarding a shuttle for the airport, or – as is the case right now – left at loose ends until your flight boards. You feel separate from the other people around you, as you don’t quite belong where you are, but you don’t belong where you were either…
It’s strange, knowing that as you sit in a mall somewhere, someone else is moving into the cabin you called home. Someone else is putting their pictures up on the walls…
Inevitably you spend most of the day traveling. Trains, planes and automobiles. For me it’s always underground trains that are the strangest, you’d think I’d be used to them after all the time I spent in London, but they always seem somewhat surreal. You’re in this totally dark space, and the train moves almost as if it was alive, like you’re in some kind of giant serpentine dragon whose cries are the ongoing squeal of the wheels against the tracks…
And then of course, there’s the airports. Don’t get me started on airports…I try so hard to keep these pages family friendly…
Tell me about it. I’ve been in my new home for a year, and the last time I went back to my hometown it didn’t feel quite right. I guess I’m the one who’s changing. I take planes more often now and the pattern of domestic flights isn’t so disruptive anymore.