I’m sitting on the second floor of an unconstructed house in Nové Město (New Town), Prague, with two 10-foot doors open to a thunderstorm and the sight of two massive church spires just past two very inconveniently-placed trees. It’s 20:43, local time. This is home.

It now is technically my third day of my first time in a new continent, and it’s my first chance to actually sit down and remark about all of this in some sort of fashion.

Getting to this point has been… a struggle to say the least, due to a whole slew of too-long-to-explain problems with my passport and whatever and whatnot. I can say that basically, if I cut it any closer with getting my passport, I would have been splitting atoms.

I met up with my travel companion and professional yoyoer friend, Jeff Coons, at the baggage drop, and went right to be frisked through security. We sat at Logan for a couple of hours, just waiting for our flight to be ready for boarding, and met up with a kind older couple headed for Johannesburg. I complain about our two flights lasting around seven-so-odd hours, they had two flights ahead of them that were over 16 hours in total.

Our flight departed at around 7:00 a.m. EST Wednesday the 18th on a rainy and miserable Boston evening for our six-so-odd hour flight to Heathrow. Now the six hour flight, that… that is something that I can’t really summarize in any kind of rational way, as it was the first step in my “Welcome-to-Europe-hey-I-hope-you-like-being-up-for-40-hours-getting-over-jet-lag” experience, and I can’t really remember too much of worth from it aside from my mind being a slurry of exhausted static and travel-related anxiety. The only way I really remember much of it was because I began writing little impressions and thoughts in a little notebook, during the flight. According to my notes, I did get to watch a David Attenborough documentary (anything with him is entertaining), “In Bruges” (The feel of the film is dark as hell but still an interesting movie), and two-thirds of “The King’s Speech” (which seemed good until the whole “not being able to finish the movie” part).

I considered just putting my notes here in verbatim to to show how I wrote them, but they really are quite rubbish, so I shan’t bother. For a quick example, somewhere over the English Channel I could see neither land nor sea, so I wrote, “Flying over the land of mashed potatoes, we are.” Inspiring words. “Head feels like a bowling ball on top of a pool noodle.” Another instant classic.

My first and only glimpse of the United Kingdom was an airport equivalent of a mall. Lovely. I was hoping to be able to get a proper UK pint of Guinness, but I suppose it’s a minor issue when we just barely got to our plane at all. I have really little else to say about Heathrow. The flight to Prague was a much shorter trip, only about a couple of hours, and by the time we landed in Prague, we had gone over 3800 miles and 6 hours forward.

Next time, in Prague.