We have been home from our cruise for almost a month now and we all had an awesome time. I’m sure that at some point I will write about it, and surely would have by now except for a crud that I picked up on the last night before we exited the ship, that only in the last day or so has chosen to leave. Allergies, I suppose but regardless, it was a rough few weeks.

This story is about the flight home. That’s what I should have titled this…

The Flight Home.

It’s an hour from Galveston to the Houston airport, and after eight days I was more than ready to get home, but we learned of Barbara Bush passing away while on the cruise and her funeral was Saturday (the day we were flying home), outside of Houston, so when we found out on our bus ride to the airport that our connecting flight in Dallas had been delayed, we really weren’t surprised. What we found out once we got to the airport was that a bad storm system had delayed quite a few flights in the mid-west and our connecting flight was one of them. We were all taking it in stride and our airline had been in the news twice while we were away, but I won’t mention their name. (rhymes with Ralph Best)…

Except I had this horrible sinus thing going on and between the nose blowing and drainage, and coughing…

Flight leaves on time to Dallas. It was about a one hour flight and extremely turbulent. No coke and no peanuts, and I was heartbroken, not because I was going to eat them or anything, but I was trying to build my supply of snacks up for the next total eclipse. Please refer to my article about total eclipses. We landed and began our wait. Literally, our plane sat in plain view for hours, and we all watched the radar on the Weather Channel. A huge weather system was centered on Oklahoma, and it did look bad for anyone heading to Nashville.

We were heading to Nashville.

You know how sometimes when you’re in Walmart, or the mall, and it’s raining like hell, so you just watch and wait for a hole, and when it comes you just run all out, like a crazy person? This whole thing kind of felt like that, and at one point I think I said something like… You know, if a woman hadn’t got sucked out the window last week, we would already be in Nashville. (by the same airline btw, that rhymes with Ralph Best), and in the same week, on another flight, sucked a bird into one of their engines.

Well, we’ve been there so long that we’re getting hungry again, so when the folks over our flight said that it would be at least another hour, our friends went to get Chinese. Maybe ten minutes pass before they return, but I’m thinking more like five, when they walk up with their food, but no joke… as soon as they got back to their seats, they called us to board. What happened in five minutes? Did the rain stop? Did they just want to see how fast two people could eat with chopsticks? By the way, you can find out a whole lot about people when you are all crammed together in a terminal for hours, and one of the things we learned was that we were flying to Nashville with a plane filled with Black Pastors and their families and they were heading back to North Carolina after being in a pastor conference in Dallas. We laughed and said that we should be all prayed up! Just a little heads up here. If you are flying Ralph Best right now, being all prayed up ain’t a bad way to get on the plane. Alright, here we go.

Our friends are sitting on the very back row and we are one row in front of them. I’m next to the window with a perfect view of the wing, my wife is in the middle seat and a woman is sitting in the aisle seat. We taxi to the runway and wait our turn to take off… and another Ralph Best plane pulls around us and takes off. And we wait. then an Alaska Airlines plane pulls around us and takes off. Wait just a damn minute, something seems a little odd here.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are having an electrical problem and our weather equipment is not working, and we are going to need it on this flight. We will return to the terminal to get that checked out. Well, I’ve never minded flying, and I’m not afraid of dying, but I’m not a stupid man either, so hell yes check that thing out… check it twice cause… I don’t wan’t to be number three on your trail of bad luck.

Back at the terminal… we’re not there five minutes and the pilot says”It’s just a fuse” Whut? Just a fuse? You better get that guy to put a couple spare fuses in your pocket mister. It was like The Wizard of Oz… they were saying one thing but I could see that they were still working in the cockpit. They were still working. It was around this time when I took what I thought might be my last picture. About fifteen minutes later we are in the air. An hour later we seem to break through the turbulence. I’m nursing this big bottle of water that I’m using to suppress my cough and it’s getting low, blowing my nose and starting to feel like I’ve been ran over, and just about that time the stewardesses get up and takes our drink order. I swear, everybody on our end of the plane gets their drink but me. The pilot told everybody to get buckled in so everybody has to drink up and everything is collected and we dropped altitude so fast that my sinuses just exploded.

I see we are over Nashville and I said something about never seeing Nashville in the air from the west side before and I’m picking out landmarks from the air and I start seeing that we passed the airport up and we are over water that is on the east side of the airport. this was at night but you could still make out the landmarks. I told my wife that we had passed the airport up and a few minutes later the pilot said something about a checklist that had to be done and we weren’t ready to land and not to worry because we had plenty of fuel. I know that we flew around Nashville for thirty minutes and I’m thinking to myself that the pilot don’t want to land. Why don’t the pilot want to land? I figured that either there was something wrong with our plane or something had happened to another plane and we were in a holding pattern until it was taken care of. If it’s us, it’s got to be the landing gear and if it’s the landing gear, we are going to hit hard. That’s what somebody that don’t know anything about planes was thinking. I kept this to myself and the plane was quiet. I have no idea what others were thinking.

“I don’t think he wants to land this plane.” That’s what I told my wife as we prepare to land, and I am focused on that wing. I was so focused on that wing that I completely missed the long row of emergency vehicles that lined the runway with their lights flashing. It was not a smooth landing, but we landed, and as we circled around, I did see those lights, those vehicles, and as we headed toward our terminal, a stewardess welcomes us to Nashville and thanks us for our prayers. Here’s the thing… not at any time did anyone ever tell us that we were in any trouble. A heads up would have been nice. Just maybe I want to spend the last thirty minutes in prayer, or holding my wife’s hand, or I don’t know… but we landed and I’m still watching that wing, when four guys run under that wing and start giving it the once over. So I took some pics. They rush us off the plane and I tell the pastor in front of me that I will be thinking of him and I told somebody else that there is no way I would fly that plane to Raleigh, and surely they would ground that plane. And I walked past the pilot, who was smoking a cigarette like he needed it.

While we were waiting for the luggage, I looked at one of the guys that had been on our flight and said something like “You do realize something major just happened on our flight don’t you?” An older woman just to my right said”I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I was sitting next to the stewardesses and they were talking real low but I could hear everything they said. The pilot thought we had a fuel leak and we were burning off fuel before we landed because they thought we would catch fire or explode.” God is good. I’ll tell you something else that’s good… being on a plane full of pastors.

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