The Saga Of The Plane Trip That Took Four Days

I'm back from the Philippines.  It's been a difficult time for me.  I want to tell the story of my trip but it is still too raw to discuss fully.  I just want to skim thru the reasons why I wanted to go home... why I wanted to visit my sister soon after I heard she was diagnosed with cancer last October.  I wanted to see her as she was--- alive and healthy... not ailing and/or dying. 

That is why I started making plans in early November so I could visit her while she was still ok... but, I did not count on the cancer to be the vicious all-invading variety that would take her just 8 hours after my plane ticket home was confirmed.  No one saw it coming so fast, so soon.

I was devastated.  I was not going to see her alive, I was going to her funeral. I can't talk yet about going home, about family I saw, about the people I met, about the places I visited, about going home.  But I can tell you about the plane trip.

I left our house at 8:00AM to catch a flight with Northwest Airlines from O'Hare, Chicago on Monday, November 17th .  From O'Hare, I had to transfer to a larger plane in Detroit, the NWA hub, where I hooked up with my sister Tessie who flew in from St. Louis.  From Detroit, our new plane would fly us to Nagoya, Japan for re-flueling and a lay-over of an hour and a half, then on to Manila.

However, the usual trip that took about 39+ hours took a lot longer because of delays and a "medical emergency".  We were flying just a few hours long on that stretch between Detroit and Nagoya when we were informed that the plane was making an unscheduled stop in Anchorage Alaska. 

The nosy uh, journalist in me kicked in and I was the first one to get the real scoop from one of the stewards.  I found out that the "medical emergency" involved the pilot, who accidentally had a huge piece of meat lodged in his trachea while he was trying to eat his dinner... he could not breathe... and no amount of first aid would dislodge it so, after a few calls to doctors at the Mayo Clinic, the remaining pilot was told to turn the plane towards Alaska where he could get the needed medical attention.

By the time we got to Anchorage, too much fuel had been expended. Time was needed to re-fuel, time was also needed to wait for a replacement pilot who was being flown in from Detroit, as of course we would not be allowed to fly commercially across international waters with just one pilot... and after all that had happened, we've lost our time in the schedule of arrivals in Japan ---- none of the airports could squeeze us in for a landing. The NWA was forced to deplane us overnight, all 472 passengers; they contracted buses to get us out of the terminal, provided hotel accomodations for us giving us $75 vouchers/person and gave us dinner ($25 vouchers /passenger).

So, there I was in ALASKA, with no coat, in my expecting-to-be-in-the-tropics-clothes, no cellphone, no wifi connections for my laptop, standing in line for dinner along with 472 hungry people at a restaurant that had already closed hours before we got there.  They had to fire up the ovens again and get servers back in, on a MONDAY night.  Palin jokes were flying.  Sleep was almost impossible so we all got bused groggy and out of sorts the next morning to our refueled plane.

As a goodwill gesture, we were given $200 vouchers applicable towards our next trips with NWA. It helped lift a few spirits though a few were quite vocal about how badly we were being treated but, we settled in for the long flight to Nagoya, Japan, our next stop.