A Plane Story

 Hello!

Yes, I am still alive!

I hope the last few weeks have been treating you well! Where does the time go? I went to Florida and I have returned. The weather was very nice. I did my best to relax, although it is not a normal state of being for me. So, while there I still got a lot done for the relative we were staying with. You can see pics on my other site.

What doesn't get said is all the drama that it took to get there and back. It's takes two flights. The flights there were fine, but the flights back, ugh! Nightmare! I cannot sleep before flying although I try. I kept checking my phone ever hour only to receive an alert from the airline at 3:30am that our first flight would be delayed and it would be arriving at the same time our connecting flight would be leaving.

So I called Customer Service to see what we could do. The man tried very hard, checking all airports within miles of both locations. Nothing. Well, we decided we would take the first flight and figure things out from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport once we got there. You see we were flying out of a small airport, and the DFW is the largest or at least one of the top three biggest airports in the United States, so just getting there would have allowed us to be on standby for a variety of fights from different carriers, plus as long as we proceeded as scheduled, because I had paid extra for trip protection, it would be on the airline to put us up in a hotel if they could not get us home.

We get to the gate for our first flight and suddenly there is a commotion that we can leave close to our original flight time if everyone gets on the plane NOW! So yes, we call move as fast as we can. Nearly everyone on the flight is in the same predicament we are in trying to catch a connecting flight. Everyone hustles, our plane gets priority takeoff, the captain flies as fast as he safely can and then we get priority landing and we "come in hot."

Is "coming in hot" just an American expression or is it universal? It means that a plane is landing at a higher rate of speed. Whereas most commercial planes come in slower. Mostly it just means your in for a bumpy, jarring landing, but of course, it does increases the risk of an accident or losing a plane tire to blowout.

So, again everyone hustles to get off and we run up and down escalators and take a tram from gate A to gate E.  According to my phone the door should be closed and the plane pushing away, but we keeping powering forward because it's not over until it's over! We round a corner and a gate agent yells "Seattle!" at us and we yell, "Yes!"  and we get on just before the door closes, whew!

I pulled a muscle in my leg, nothing serious. It just hurt and was really annoying for a few days.