My toenail got ripped in one of the lower side holes.
(by Carol)
Upon arriving at the Brussels airport, they made rather a fuss over us: ordering wheelchairs for us, which I very gruffly refused and to which Pam responded with similar disdain. We made our way up away from the plane, me with my walker and Pam with her cane. It was a long and winding road (sorry, couldn’t resist) walk up to the exit, roughly two flights up from the ground level of the plane. (Hurray! No stairs!) At the top, we were greeted by a man who insisted that we hop onto his golf-cart, declaring that it really was too far a walk for us to the next gate. (Note: after she boarded the golf cart, he said to her, “There you are, my lady!”) We talked with him about whether or not it was too far walk with Pam’s cane and my walker (because I had this ancient memory of the Brussels airport, which was of a rather small and cramped, and dark space in which people were crammed, and there was only a gift shop and a small restaurant), and while we were talking, I had casually slipped one of my feet out of its shoe. I was wearing crocks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention, and when I shoved my foot back into the shoe, my pinky toenail caught one of the side holes and I ripped the nail partially off. “Ouch!” I yelled. “!!@##@$#!!!” I thought quietly to myself. But we had to keep moving, so I just did what one does when there’s no time for pain: ignored it. Maybe the attendant heard my mental “!!@##@$#!!!!” because he didn’t call me “My lady.” Oh well.
Brussels Airport
Anyway, the golf cart zoomed off as he rattled off in Dutch (I think) to someone about the “American Dames” —racing past people, dodging about the halls, making near misses, until he arrived at the customs, where we were ushered to the front of the lines, again, and people glared at us, again. We got our stamps, went through, and were greeted by a seemingly calmer (if not also younger) man, who drove just as crazy-fast, arrived at what we all thought was the correct gate (by the way, literally miles from our arrival gate), discovered that, in the midst of our journey, the flight’s departure had been switched to another gate, but that new gate hadn’t been announced yet, so we had to wait, sitting in the cart, waiting, waiting, watching, wondering if we would actually have time to stop somewhere and buy some Brussels chocolate, and realizing that we probably wouldn’t, and then becoming concerned that maybe the flight had been cancelled, or that it was already boarding and we were the only ones who didn’t know where the right gate was located, and ….. ahhhhh!
Bing! The departure gate appeared on the board and off we zoomed, right past the rich smells of chocolate floating out of a store into the general airport air, straight to the gate, and we boarded the plane five minutes later. On the plane, we were each given aisle seats, directly across from each other. Unfortunately, I sat next to this grandmother who was holding a very cute baby, whom she allowed to invade my space in all sorts of ways, including bouncing him from my right leg to the left leg of the man sitting to her right (apparently the grandfather/husband). But the baby was cute, so I just pretended to fall asleep, and soon both he and grandma did as well.
My toe hurt. I hadn’t gotten the chance to empty my bladder between flights, the plane was crowded, and I was tired from a very restless pseudo on the plane. It wasn’t very difficult for me to fall asleep on this final flight of our journey.