We left McAllen, Texas on the 1st of March to fly to Cape Town, South Africa (Suid Afrika is the Afrikaans spelling of that). It was a longer journey than usual. We flew from McAllen to Dalla-Fort Worth to Chicago to Madrid, Spain to Johannesburg, South Africa to Cape Town, South Africa.
When you fly to South Africa you always have to fly to somewhere else first. Since it is 8,600 miles (one way) from the McAllen to Capetown there isn't any commercial jet that can fly that far without refueling and they can't be refueled in mid-air like a military aircraft can 😱. So, you typically end up going through somewhere in Europe. Also, virtually all trans-Atlantic flights from the US to Europe leave in the afternoon and fly through the night and land in the morning the next day. Then, since, even when you get to Europe (Rome is the closest "big" European city) you have go AT LEAST another 4800 miles to get to Johannesburg. Ed is at an elevation of 2188 feet AND it was March 1st, so the temperature was 36 degrees when we landed. Of course we are heading to South Africa where it is Summer (Southern Hemisphere), so we only have only one summer clothes with us and NOT coats, gloves, etc. Forget exotic, its freezing out here. We just rented a room in the Transit Hotel in the airport and slept for 5 hours and then worked our way over to the gate for our flight that would be leaving in another 9 hours. (On the up-side between the flight over and our mega-layover in Madrid, I did get to watch the whole final season of Rizzoli and Isles).
When we arrived in Johannesburg, because we had "purchased" our tickets using our American Airlines frequent flier points, we had to wait the whole day in Johannesburg and fly out the next day (Saturday, March 4th) to Cape Town. So, we were in transit a total of 80 hours - 3 days, 8 hours. That sets a "personal worst" for ME!
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