The delay of a Qantas flight from Sydney to San Francisco on a Saturday recently caused me and my wife to miss a connecting flight and spend an extra eleven hours in traveling the 8,000 and some miles from Brisbane to the Dallas Fort Worth airport (DFW).
Instead of enjoying an evening with my daughter and her family in Texas, Kristi and I wandered around the Sydney airport’s international terminal for about eight hours, we flew for about 13 more across the Pacific Ocean, and then, for several additional hours, we walked the chilly, nighttime streets of San Francisco.
Because we had bags checked onto our delayed Qantas flight, we were told at the Sydney airport, we could not leave the secured area, so our thoughts of seeing Sydney’s sights on a pleasant summer afternoon were foiled.
Surprisingly, since airport security measures usually seem stricter in the US than in Australia, having our bags checked in for an American Airlines “red eye” flight to DFW did not require us to stay in the terminal, so we caught a train down to San Francisco’s harbor area.
Being tired and more than a little addled, though, we didn’t think of taking out winter jackets before we let our bags disappear on American Airlines conveyor belts. So, dressed for Aussie summer, we couldn’t really enjoy a brisk and windy December evening near Fisherman’s Wharf. Soon we returned reluctantly to the warmth of an airport lounge.
Does it sounds like I’m complaining? I have been doing some of that.
But I realize at the same time how trivial our delays were in the context of our getting to travel from one hemisphere to another to see friends and family. Such travel is a modern-day miracle even in difficult circumstances, one available only to the fortunate few, crowded though the airports seemed as we paced around in two of them.
Now, having seen news reports of a massive ice storm that struck Oklahoma, Kansas, and elsewhere a few hours after we arrived just to its south, I am grateful to be here at all. Airports in Oklahoma City and Tulsa were shut down completely for a time and perhaps a million people — 600,000 in Oklahoma — are without power still, in freezing weather.
Twenty four deaths due to from the cold, the glaze, and thousands of falling trees have been reported. The misery of people without heat or hot food or lights is painful to contemplate, especially since some of these folks are people we know.
We humans make plans. Sometimes events, natural or otherwise, cancel those plans for us and leave us out in the cold, literally. Suddenly, 11 extra hours of travel time going from home in Australia to home in the US seem… well, that seems not so bad. Not so bad at all.
– Bob
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