Lounges & Layovers| South Africa, Day 1

Saturday, September 15, 2018
3 AM came very early.  I had made the questionable decision that week to try and go to sleep a little earlier and wake up a little earlier each day. I should know better by now that my pre-trip anxiety was going to lead to a night of troubled sleep regardless of any sleep prep I'd done. I slept very lightly until Francisco came in a little after 3:30 to get me up. He had pre-booked an Uber the night before for around 4:10. A half hour to get ready goes by very quickly - especially when I decide to also get one last YouTube video posted lol! 

This was our first time using Uber, and we had a really positive experience. The guy was very polite and professional, offering us mints and helping get our bags into his pick-up truck.
CVG Airport Selfie
Our flight left CVG at 6:00 AM, and it was less than an hour and a half until we landed at Washington Dulles International Airport. I've heard questionable things about airplane coffee, so I opted for an orange juice and started reading The Wonder, which I finished over the course of this trip. It's by the same author as Room, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and this book is about a young Irish girl who apparently has no need for food and the English nurse who is assigned to watch over her and assess how she has managed to survive without eating.
Somewhere around the middle of the flight, I noticed that there was something going on with the couple in front of us. I could hear the husband saying "Judy, Judy, wake up, baby" in an urgent tone, and I saw that he had his arm around her. It was apparent that she was unconscious, so I turned around and flagged down a flight attendant and urgently gestured to the seat in front of us. I heard him explain that she'd had a seizure, and it seemed like she had some kind of health condition and this wasn't completely unusual behavior for her. I was watching with concern, but she regained consciousness. The flight attendants continued to check in on the couple, and paramedics came on board as soon as we landed.

Landing at 7:20 AM, we wouldn't fly out to Ethiopia until 11:00 AM, so we had plenty of time for breakfast. Through our United MileagePlus credit card, we had free passes to a United Club lounge, so we decided it was about time to finally check out an airport lounge. [Click here to earn 40,000 bonus miles by opening a United credit card and meeting the minimum spend requirements.]

Since we really only travel once per year, I'm not sure that a club membership would be worth it for us, but if you travel more regularly, I'd say it's definitely worth it! It was much more quiet, less crowded, spacious, cleaner.
Empty United Lounge
There was free continental breakfast, so I had plenty of yogurt, coffee, oatmeal, and pastries.
United continental breakfast
I used the opportunity to call home one last time (Mom seemed particularly worried about this trip), and then spent some time on the computer.
I've found that Reddit can be a helpful source to get up-to-date information. I used it to ask about airport parking in Cincinnati, which ultimately led us to decide to just use Uber, which was roughly the same cost as what it would have cost to pay to park for a couple of weeks.  I used it to find the best place in Durban to get bunny chow and to check in on the quality/safety of the local water supply.

On Friday, the day before we were leaving, I stumbled across this subject line on Reddit: "USA warns its citizens against South Africa". Fantastic.
This prompted me to toss out one final question to the Reddit community about the key safety precautions to keep in mind. We'd already come across several suggestions, but I was interested to see what responses popped up. 

Seeing responses like this was enough to freak us out a little, but I think they were being a tad dramatic:
We had definitely already heard to be vigilant while driving and at night.
In general, I would say that the response below sums up the core advice.
We pretty much stayed in the lounge up to the last minute, having multiple iterations of breakfast before we headed over to board our next flight.  Our 13-hour and 15-minute flight. I'm pretty sure this is our longest flight ever.
Ethiopia was 7 hours ahead of US Eastern time, and we would arrive there at 7:15 AM. I read more of Wonder and watched Life of the Party before attempting to sleep.  My plan was to sleep as much as possible on this flight. And I tried. I had bought the Trtl travel pillow and picked up a beach ball to try an airplane hack I'd ran across. I'm not sure I got a wink of sleep, and Francisco got the tiniest bit. I was definitely rocking a migraine, and I found that the way the Trtl pillow puts pressure on your neck kind of exacerbated my migraine symptoms. While I didn't actually get any sleep to speak of on this leg of the trip, I found the beach ball mildly useful and I would try it again. Plus, at the grand price point of $1, it's a steal compared to other travel accessories. Sure, we felt a little silly inflating it, but it didn't attract any attention and I could easily conceal it under a blanket.
I rested as well as I could, but I was already dreading the next 6.5-hour flight we would have after our brief layover in Ethiopia. 

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