The other passangers were calling it,"The plane ride from Hell." My personal thought is that if it were the plane ride from Hell, we would have crashed and blown up, burning to death. But we didn't, we were just simply refined and had our faith stretched, our patience expanded, and our stomachs excercised as we fought off severe nausia and motion sickness.
So here's what happened. I fell asleep around 1 or 2 AM on the 8th of December. Part of it was excitement that I got to go home for Christmas. The other part was some girls decided that they were going to go outside my window and express their joy at freedom from school by feral screaming. I guess they forgot that some people still think nighttime is for sleeping.
Anyway, I then woke up at 5 AM the next morning and got ready to go. Nicole drove me to the airport and we hugged goodbye and wished each other a Merry Christmas.
Once at the ticketbooth, the guy was convinced that it would be faster if I changed my flight from flying into Minneanapolis and then flying to Omaha to drive home, to flying into Memphis then Omaha, and then driving home. I said I didn't want to change it but he insisted and I was too tired to argue.
Biggest mistake of the day!!!
I found out later that a flight to Minneanapolis was cancled and the person was pretty sure it was my flight. I can only hope, because it helps ease the intense frustration I felt at the poor dude at the ticket counter.
So I got onto the airplane. Business as usual. Normal safety procedures demonstration, normal introducing yourself to the person sitting next to you and then pulling out your book, normal, "Why on earth are you reading Albert Mohler's latest book for PLEASURE?!" conversation (okay I've never done that before but the conversation that insued was pretty normal. 'What are you doing with your life and why, hunh okay you are interesting but wierd' conversation) etc.
Until we got to Tennessee. Then the nice normal scenery of cool bumpy carpet-like clouds below us and wispy clouds above us changed to complete white of clouds all around us. And they started to get grey. The Captian announced that Memphis was experiancing some storms, but not to worry, we would land soon.
The turbulance started getting bad and my stomach began commenting about how it would like to either land or go home now.
The stewardess or flight attendant or whatever we call them these days then got on and said that we still couldn't land and would be circling for a while.
A half hour later it was announced that we were going to fly into Nashville as we were running out of fuel.
Oh joy.
So we landed in Nashville and parked. We then noticed that there was a plane that had landed before us and three others were pulling up. Not good.
They finally gave us a gate and we pulled in. I was able to get out and call my friend who was going to pick me up at the airport in Omaha and call my parents to let them know what was up. CNN said that flights in Memphis and Baltimore were backed up by an hour. Joy.
I decided that I didn't really want to go to Memphis at that point. I could re-switch my flight and go to Minneanapolis as planned. Unfortunately quite a few other people had the same idea and as soon as I was the next person in line the Captain came running down the gangway and told everyone to get back on the plane.
So we did, and fifteen minutes later we took off again. They had re-fueled and were going to try to land in Memphis.
As soon as we got close to Memphis the clouds went from white to dark gray and the turbulance was terrible. My stomach said if I didn't do something it would go on strike. So I closed my eyes and began praying kind of hard.
We kept that up for what felt like an hour but was probably 15 minutes before the Captian announced that once again we were running out of fuel and would have to find someplace else to land, and Huntsville Alabama would probably be it.
"What, are we doing a tour of all the 'ville' airports in the South?" Someone asked.
So we arrived in Huntsville, Alabama. We were all glad to be on the ground but starting to wonder how we were going to make our connecting flights as it was 11 at that point.
The captains voice crackled on the speaker, "Uhhh.. Ladies and Gentlemen, we will deplane as soon as we can, but no one is answering us at the airport and we don't know if they have a gate for us or not... so as soon as we get ahold of someone, then we'll let you know what we know."
Seriously?!?!
"What, no one noticed there's an extra plane just parked out there?" A businessman asked.
Several minutes later another voice crackled over the intercom.
"This is the manager of the airport. We want to welcome you to Huntsville, Alabama. Right now we are experiancing an unusual situation with the storm in Memphis, and we have a lot of people in our airport who don't belong. So we're gonna just ask you to sit tight till we figure something out."
"They are not going to make us sit here the whole time! How long is that going to be?" people started asking. It was now almost 12 and our flight had left at 7:30 am.
"This is the manager of the airport again. The Captain has requested that we allow you to deplane. So we'll allow you to come up to the gate, but do not I repeat DO NOT enter the main airport or we will not allow you to come back. You don't have a boarding pass for any other flight as you aren't even supposed to have landed here. We will let you know once we know something what your next course of action will be." He then told us about their coffee shop/snack shack/'hot dog stand' where we could get food in the airport and repeated a few warnings about not leaving the terminal we were in.
So we went into the airport and got lunch. Ten bucks for a tea, a water, and a sandwhich. I hate eating in airports. It's SO not worth the money!!
So I ate with two other ladies from my flight and we watched in growing perturbation as CNN announced that the storm system in Memphis was slowly taking over the midwest.
"They had better not leave us here!" One lady commented, and the two began saying how this was the plane flight from hell.
Hmm... no, more like the plane ride from purgatory! We hadn't crashed, we had just all felt somewhat sick during the turbulence and were having beautiful opportunities to practice patience!
I personally stayed in Huntingville (or huntsville, I still can't remember it's name) until 5:30. They were able to change my flight so that I could fly into Cincinnatti and then straight home instead of flying into Omaha. Yay!!
So i arrived around 9:45. At 10:00 I discovered that while I was able to make the flight to Cincinatti, none of my luggage had!! Part of the problem was that I had switched from Northwest Airlines to Delta, and my bags apparently made it to Omaha, where i was originally supposed to go!! So the bags apparently made it to Omaha this morning, and should get here tonight or tomorrow. Usually it's the younger sister stealing clothes from the older sister's closet, but apparently my sister and I are gonna pull a switch-er-oo on the ol' tradition. Fortunately we're built pretty similar she's just taller and has a shorter torso.
Okay I want my own clothes!!
So anyway. There's my latest adventure! I was able to help out a pregnant mom by playing with her six-year old and four-year old (and every once and a while her 13 month old) daughters by coloring with them and playing on the wheelchair with them. So my arms hurt now but we had fun. :-D
So yeah.... there's my wonderful traveling story for this six-month period. Woot woot!
So now I'm home, which is great, and have been shown or am discovering the latest changes and updates and recent homework and cooking victories by my siblings and catching up with mom. Yay!!
And I still need to finish reading Acts through Revelation and write an 8 to 20 page paper on a summary of one of those books before next week. *sigh* Ah well. I sort of brought it upon myself by signing up for so many D-and-J-terms.
More later!
~Princess Ouch~
