We landed in Dubai around 04:20.  After disembarking, we had to go through a security check specific to people making connections, and that didn’t take very long.  Inside the terminal, even with a decent amount of people, the airport was whisper quiet.  It would be nice if US had quiet airports.  We walked right past the Sky Bar and we joked about getting some passionfruit mango margaritas, but then kept on walking.  Looking for something palatable, we walked around a lot, getting what we knew would be our only exercise all day.  

We ended up at The Hangar.  The food and drink was pricey, but at least there was no rave music.  The airport started to get busier around 05:30 or 06:00.  We were in the far corner, able to just hang out in peace for a bit.  We stayed there until a little after 07:00.  Our gate was right nearby, and at the gate there was a check-in to go to the gate-specific waiting area downstairs, like what we’d done when we flew to the Seychelles a few weeks prior.  Since Justin had SSSS on his boarding pass and would need to have his bags checked, we figured it couldn’t hurt to go downstairs early.  When we tried to go through the automatic gates, Justin was instructed to go to the desk.  He figured it was because of the SSSS, but it was actually just because he was too tall for the camera that was taking pictures to verify people’s identity.

Downstairs there was SSSS security, but ironically Justin got through this faster than Crystal got through the regular line.  Crystal noted that everyone was getting a bag check, SSSS or not, and Justin’s check was less instrusive and in a shorter line.  The plane boarded group C, D, then F - we were E.  We never figured out why they boarded the groups out of alphabetic order.  On the plane, the guy across the aisle from us was coughing up a storm whilst wearing his mask on his chin.  Indeed, no one around us was wearing their masks, and the flight attendants weren’t doing anything once again.

At some point, Justin - politely - asked the serial cougher to put his mask up, and thankfully he did without protest.  Crystal had breakfast whilst Justin was already asleep from the Dramamine he’d taken just prior to boarding.  He woke up after about 4 hours of intermittent sleep.  We noticed that further back in the plane a lot of people had whole rows to lay down on.  We were jealous, as we didn’t even have an empty seat next to us, and we were surrounded by people with the plague.  [It was a good thing we’d just had COVID.]  The flight path was basically due north over Iran, the Caspian Sea, Russia, and almost directly over the North Pole.

At “breakfast” (it was 05:00 in LA, but 16:00 in Dubai), they served us chicken and rice.  Crystal asked “are we having tacos for dinner?”  Justin responded “I was thinking chicken and rice.”  We passed the time in a variety of ways, including games on the seatback, updating the travel log, reading, listening to podcasts, trying to figure out who on the plane had COVID and who didn’t, walking up and down the aisles, etc.  The kid in front of us was constantly shaking his seat (and thus our trays and video screens), but we avoided fighting a 7 year old.

The hardest part of the flight was the third quarter (hours 8-12), as being halfway done, but still needing 8 hours, and being 75% done, but still needing 4 hours, was tough to swallow.  The last couple hours went by quickly, in part because we got some more sleep.  Crystal spent a long time playing one game (Bejeweled) and amassing over 500,000 points, far and away the most on the plane’s system.  We landed a little early, around 13:45 in Los Angeles, and once off the plane we knew the drill on how to expeditiously get through the hallways to immigration and customs, through Global Entry, and to baggage.  

That all worked great.  But then we had to wait and wait for our bag to arrive.  Once we finally had our bag, we had to navigate the ever-changing LAX setup to find where to get on the Hertz bus, but eventually we found it one terminal over.  At Hertz, Crystal got us a much smaller car, a Hyundai Venue, that hopefully wouldn’t chug as much gas on the drive to San Diego.  The drive was fine, with not much traffic (relatively) since it was the middle day of a 3-day weekend.  The vehicle used less than 3 gallons to get us to San Diego, and Crystal did a great job driving after a month of us being passengers only.  We wanted to avoid going inside our condo until we’d returned the rental car, but neither of us had keys to our car, so we had to go inside briefly.  The dogs seemed more confused than happy to see us, but eventually they remembered us.  We told them we’d be back much sooner this time, and true to our word, in about 25 minutes we were.