To Casablanca, Morocco

Disembarking from Royal Air Maroc in Casablanca the next morning--the night having been shortened by flying eastward: Rick Bauman, trip organizer, was there to meet us. After gathering bikes and baggage and clearing Moroccan customs, it was off to Marrakech which is about two hours south. That is where we would enjoy a day touring the city, and where we'd begin our bicycle trip on the second morning, May 7th.



I'll let you figure out why these lights on Long Island, soon after our takeoff from JFK to Casablanca on Royal Air Maroc, appear to pass in curved lines OVER the wing.

From JFK near New York City, we flew northeast just off the coast of Long Island. Northeast? Casablanca is east and a little south of there. It's called "great circle" routing. On the way home, we would fly over Cape Cod, Providence, and Long Island Sound enroute back to JFK. I'm sure this was Air Traffic Control's way of maintaining separation between arriving and departing aircraft.

Boarding jetBlue in Denver on May 5, 2007. As the screens on the seatbacks say, jetBlue really does have more legroom and that's wonderful. However, the airline does NOT transfer baggage to other carriers (as least not to Royal Air Maroc) so I had to collect it all including my plastic bike box and take it to the international terminal myself.

I'd never been to JFK airport before, but had been told about their train system. A helpful employee found me a cart for free and told me what I needed to do. I made my way to the train terminal, found that I could wheel my cart right aboard, and off I went to the proper terminal. JFK is arranged like a big circle, so it wasn't hard to figure out. You do have to ride an elevator up to a walkway across a road, then back down on the other side to your terminal.

Once there, check-in went quickly, my bike box and largest bag disappeared into the system again, and I was soon sitting at the proper gate where I joined several others that I knew from Cycle Myanmar in 2004. It was late afternoon by then.