crschmidt

Have fun, and fly safe! Oh, and tell me what it's like to fly across the Atlantic. I've never sone that. :)

Good luck - not that the Boy Genius will need it. ;)

Will do!

For the most part, a window seat on long-haul is not that interesting. You're probably routeing well south of Greenland from there and even then, you'd want left side to Europe, right side to the US to see it. If you're on a typical flight then it'll be dark coming over so you'll just get to see all the stars. In daylight you usually just get to see the tops of clouds and occasionally bits of water with the occasional ship visible. The downside of a window seat is when you need to get up and disturb the other occupant. The upside is that you can sleep happily and he won't have to disturb you when he gets up :-)

Is your cellphone 3G or GSM? If it's a CDMA phone then leave it behind. Make sure everything else is insured and that you've got a complete backup at home of everything you need. Burning a CD/DVD of important stuff to have along in a diferent bag might also help so even if your kit doesn't arrive, you can still acquire a temporary replacement and carry on.

I recommend trying to sleep on the way here, you're doing an overnight flight and even a couple of hours sleep can help. Set your watch to Swiss time once you're in the air and start thinking in the correct timezone. It also helps once you've woken up if you open the window blind and stare out into the bright morning - it resets part of the brain and actually helps with jet-lag. If you work it out, you get up at a normal time in the morning in Boston that corresponds to mid-afternoon in Europe. You get on a plane and fly to Europe and arrive early/mid morning the next day and then have to survive until evening - that's about 36 hours bed to bed.

Don't forget you have to carry the luggage, and you might want spare capacity on the homeward leg for souvenirs and gifts.

D

I prefer window seats on any flight when I'm by myself -- it's nice not to have someone next to you on one side, and not to have people constantly brushing past you, as you do on an aisle.

I have a piece of advice on the electronics: I find a small extension cord extremely useful. I plug the foreign adapter into the extension cord, plug it in, and then I can plug all of my US electronics (with international power supplies, of course) into the extension cord. It's nice to be able to charge everything at the same time

I love looking at stars. I will actually sit in a window seat on a night flight *solely* to see stars: Especially when you're flying over dark country, the view can be really great (so long as other people around you aren't reading or something). It's one of the reasons I want to learn to fly (although obviously not a practical one) because I want to be able to see the night sky without obstructions. It's not practical because to do night flying, I probably have to do a hell of a lot more training than is practical for me :)

It's a GSM phone: it's a tri-band, so I'll get at least one of the Swiss frequencies. Cost is 99cents/minute for voice, and 35 cents apiece for text messages -- but that's enough to get a "Get to skype. The girls just went into the hospital" message or something like that.

I tend to doze on red-eye flights. I think that getting on the plane is going to be very cathartic: I'm packing up the computer for flying, but I don't expect I'll really be doing a ton on it, because I expect to fall asleep.

Luggage is going to be a single carryon (backpack) and a single (large) duffel with easy to hold handles: large enough to carry all my stuff and then some, small enough to be carryable through plane, train, and automobile.

Thanks for the advice!

Huh. I always find the jet lag much worse travelling east than travelling west.

Thanks -- you're the second person to recommend that to me, and I ran over to the office so I could take care of it.

The pillow/sweater thing I would have totally forgotten: I usually do layers for the plane, but I hadn't thought about it because the weather in Switzerland is going to be so nice. I'll make sure I do that.