Eggs On A Plane

(posted a day late, I made it to Mexico City!, I will post this one before I write about the rest of my journey; I feel I need to nod to the airline travel experience)

A hard boiled egg can be eaten with such thoughtlessness ordinarily. 

But not in my current situation. 

When I travel on airlines, no detail goes unplanned. This is a vestigial trait from the first flights I took alone, at 19, on my early journeys-without-parents where I was deeply anxious and thrilled by the whole operation and thus planned each detail as my coping mechanism. Details like packing the ideal snacks high energy but compact, the most comfortable clothing, the best diverting reading material. Whatever it may have been was an important journey and I had to have met it with readiness! 

I also do not believe in purchasing food while being held in a terminal or, while on a plane, that overly advertised $5 cardboard snack box containing 3 peanuts in a plastic packet, a single spear of beef jerky in a second parcel, and half a raisin in a third wee cup. 

So this is how I came to be regarding my hard-boiled egg, now doubting my snack choice, surrounded by beautiful Mexican people in the back of an airplane. What I had thought: "what a tidy compact high protein unit an egg is!" What I was thinking now: "how am I possibly going to get into this shell?", and: "how is everyone in rows 22 thru 25 going to assume the sudden onset of old egg smell isn't something else?" 

I also laughed to myself with this possibility: what if this egg had been misfiled in the fridge and was actually raw? Imagine yolk and white flowing wetly where it would as I was buckled into coach. I wouldn't be able to reach the Air Motion Sickness Bag fast enough. 

I tapped the egg tentatively on the plastic armrest, highly self-conscious; the smart smack needed to get into the shell would undoubtedly concern my neighbors. Nothing happened. Way to go, organic chickens. 

Have you ever tried to crack an egg by squeezing it? This is much more difficult than I had imagined. Nothing gave. So I tried the Single Thumb Pressure Method and suddenly found myself with white all up my thumbnail and an egg looking like it had just experienced a violent blowout. 

Success. Thank you, protein. 

Here I am on my way to Mexico City, abundantly obvious that I have too much time for needless egg writing. I trust my bicycle is in its massive hard-sided case beneath me. For this third bicycle tour of mine I am not flying with a cardboard box (having been refused boarding to a flight last time), instead with this case that I will leave with a warmshowers host while I loop around southern Mexico. It weighs 70 pounds with the bike (and it's kickstand, yes, Uncle Greg) inside it. That this box has wheels makes me incredibly grateful, and once it reaches cruising speed we could easily wipe out a family of four. 

I will have 1.5 days to walk and gape and eat my way around Mexico City, and then I cart my box and myself back to the airport for a short and incredibly cheap flight to Oaxaca. There, amazingly and serendipitously, I meet Partner Kathy exactly a year to the date from when I met her randomly in Colombia. (If you haven't read the post about how she came to be Partner Kathy, it really is highly recommended) 

It seemed impossible until we did it, fitting my bicycle in this thing. My dad woke up from a nap and announced he had figured out the puzzle. Hint: it has to do with wheel placement.