Exotic Travel

Exotic travel. Doesn't that sound fun!

Many people have told me they are excited about my Sabbatical travel. There have even been a few who have offered to go hidden in one of my suitcases!

As I sit in the flat at Oxford typing on the computer, the reality of exotic travel has hit me with full force. There were a few delays yesterday leaving the Lexington airport, but nothing major. Apparently somewhere in the Amazon a butterfly fluttered its wing and caused a thunderstorm that stopped not only our President's speech, but also the plane coming from Chicago that would start my journey.

Finally at about 4 o'clock we boarded the plane that had been scheduled to depart at 2:30. I was still fine, my flight from O'hare to London didn't leave until 6:15 our time and the flight there would take just an hour once it got in the air.

The pilot was in a hurry. Everyone was seated quickly, and we pushed back from the gate and . . . stopped. We sat puzzled as his voice came over the speakers--"There is a hold on flights into Chicage due to the weather." Twice more he came on before we had waited on the Lexington tarmac for an hour. This was American Airlines who has an unfortunate reputation with these things, so I was cheered to see they had learned something as our flight attendant brought big bags of trail mix and water to everyone when we hit the hour mark.

I still could make it. The pilot announced it was time to go. Relief swept over me. But then he came on again. Our approval was for a new route that would take us to Memphis. Just as that sank in, the intercom dinged and we were told that because we had been sitting for an hour and a half running the air conditioner, we didn't have enough gas to take the longer route. So the slow truck loaded with aviation fuel lumbered over and belched its contents into our thirsty tank.

We all breathed easier as the tanker trunk pulled away from our plane. We were ready to finally be off. And then instead of the throttle, the pilot hit the intercom and announced that the fueling had taken so long that we had lost our window. Can you say the natives were getting restless! Even the granola bars served at the two hour mark were ineffective in calming the mood. There were a few very vocal gripers, but it didn't make much sense to me as the people who were making the announcements weren't the ones making the decisions. Some of my fellow passengers would have been happy to shoot the messengers. But, thank goodness, before wholesale violence broke out, the plane took off. It was after we had spent two hours and forty minutes sitting in its narrow sheet metal.

The 6:30 flight to London seemed not to have any problems however, as it flew off without me, without even an apology or a glance over its shoulder. I was able to get the last remaining seat on the next flight to Heathrow and ended up running from gate to gate at O'hare to make it.

An exotic trip to London? More like twelve of thirteen hours spent like a prisoner bound to an electric chair.

When my book bag group read the Tolkien novels, they made an interesting observation. The movies rushed from battle to battle while the original books were much more winding journeys and conversations with fights added almost for punctuation. The consensus was that Peter Jackson wanted an action movie so he left out a lot of the character development through conversation and journey and went straight to the violence. The same story told two different ways.

So is it an exotic trip or a stressful nightmare? Depends on how you tell it.