I am tired. I got up at 4:00 in the morning so at 7 I could get on a 5-hour flight to New Jersey. I waited for 4 hours in New Jersey, then sat on a plane to England for 6 hours. Let’s see…do our maths…5 plus 4 plus 6 equals 15! Which leaves 7 hours out of the day for sleeping! Which is ideal, but in reality I’d probably stay up for another hour or two. So add waiting on the tarmac, going through customs, waiting in the special airport waiting spot…time to go to bed!

WRONG. (I can’t find color or font size change on here, so just imagine fiery red font. Very dramatic.) It is now 7:00 in the morning again, and there are things to do. (I’m not complaining, I’m just dramatizing for the entertainment of the reader.)

Interestingly, it’s 7:30 (pm now, but 11:30 in the am for you) and I’m thinking I could go to bed soon. This never happens.

So, I’m supposed to write about the scene that greeted me upon my arrival in England, but honestly, that’s not much to talk about. Ok, wait. Back up. I would like to talk about the scene in which the plane came low enough for me to finally see England, not when I first set foot in England, because that was just walking for a long time in the morning with a bunch of other tired people.

I was a little disappointed leaving New Jersey, because the sun set just before the plane took off, and I had never flown over the ocean before. I wanted to see the Atlantic, but the hours of darkness coincided almost perfectly with our journey over it. I could just make out the horizon as we flew across the edges of Ireland. Turns out I couldn’t have seen anything anyway: as the sun rose I saw that there was a thick cloud layer over everything. No breaks. We crossed Ireland and got closer and closer to Manchester, and finally started our descent. We broke through the cloud cover–wisps tangling in the wings of the plane and leaving torn streaks behind–but I still couldn’t see anything. The light was dim and everything was grey. We got lower and lower, and suddenly I could see yellow lights springing up in the grey below, so clear and distinct I could have counted them.

And there was England. And it was raining. I couldn’t have planned it more perfectly. Little cities with tall brick houses and cul-de-sacs and cars driving on the left side of the road.  It was the cars that did it. Watching them driving the way they did in movies, it was real, something that existed my world, and the rain. It was brilliant. I didn’t realize how much I had missed the rain until I saw it slicking the streets beneath the left-side drivers. I was staring dazedly out the window when the man next to me said, “Welcome to England, in the rain.” He sounded like he was from the Manchester area himself, and hearing his voice as he acknowledged and accepted my foreignness (I know, silly word, but real) completed that perfect picture. I didn’t take any photos then; the beauty of the city below couldn’t be captured through the thick airplane window, but I have pictures from touring the city of Ormskirk later that day, and many of the feelings that overwhelmed me on the plane were rekindled during that walk.