Before I could unleash my excitement for my first trip to another continent, I first had to endure a full day of travel. I had connected flights before but I never had to experience a seven hour layover until Sunday. The first leg of our trip was a late morning United Express flight from Charlotte Douglas International Airport to Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia. I traveled with my fellow BSSP scholars, Ziad, Maya, and Jane, as well as Jeffrey Feagin, a Virgin Atlantic representative who was with us to make sure that our connection was as smooth as possible. While we were at Dulles, we got to ride the mobile lounge and the "AeroTrain" people mover between the concourses and terminals. Charlotte Douglas doesn't have any kind of inter-terminal transportation (since there is only one terminal), so experiencing getting to ride the mobile lounge and AeroTrain was a highlight of the layover. One other highlight of the long layover was getting to go to the Udvar-Hazy Center which is the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's annex at the southern end of Dulles. The museum is essentially a large aircraft hangar that houses all kinds of spacecraft and aircraft that marked significant moments in aerospace history. I was especially interested in the large display of the Space Shuttle Discovery because of its sheer size and the fact that the spacecraft had 39 flights totaling almost 150 million miles around Earth. That number is mind-boggling.
The Space Shuttle Discovery
Our second and last leg of the journey was an early evening Virgin Atlantic flight from Dulles to London-Heathrow International Airport. We said goodbye and thank you to Jeffrey for his help before boarding the flight. This flight was my first on a plane that had a middle row and also my first where meals were served. For dinner on the plane, I had Mexican chicken and rice along with a roll (it definitely exceeded my expectations for airplane food). After that, I tried to get a good rest under my complimentary blanket as our plane flew into a new day.
Flying over Nova Scotia
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