August 16, 2005 - the journey

It all started Tuesday August 16th, 2005. Andrew, Ellie, and I got up at 3:15 am to do our final packing and headed onward to the airport. My parents and Andrew’s mom were there to send us off, and I must say there were much fewer tears than I expected. Whew! We got our Timmy Ho Ho’s and waited. And waited. And waited. We were informed by another person on our flight that the delay was due to the fact that it took US so long to check in (because we had 6 pieces of luggage). She said that it put them far behind. We thanked her for her opinion and tried to avoid her for the rest of the wait. But the wait went on and on and we later learned it was due to weather. Not lil’ ol’ me and Andrew. We finally get on the plane and waited… again. And waited. Apparently the toilet wasn’t working so they had to rush up a repair person. At this point we are starting to get nervous about missing our connection. The repair person came and left only to have confirmed that yes it was indeed broken. So the only option was to deplane, let everyone use the washroom and the board again. We had a nice pee break, boarded yet again and eventually we did take off; however at this point, we know full well that we have missed our connection and were fearing there might not be another connection in San Juan to get us to Antigua. The thought of having to deal with 4 massive bags of luggage, 2 bikes in boxes, and one freaked out dog with the possibility of overnighting in an airport was not very appealing. Luckily they had rebooked us on later flights and we still were gonna make it, just a few hours later.

We arrived at JFK only to meet much less friendly people. We were given a porter to help us bring our luggage to the appropriate floor and I don’t know if we have ever met anyone that useless before. We arrived at the elevator and the porter concluded that the bags were too wide to fit in it while on the pushcart. And he just stood there. Several minutes passed with no ideas from him so Andrew took it upon himself to unload each bag into the elevator, and throw the pushcarts on top and then reload them on the next floor. All while the porter watched. We have now started to feel sketchy as to whether this guy even know where our luggage is supposed to go and are feeling somewhat pessimistic that our luggage will even get on the plane. But it went down one of the many chutes and so we headed to our gate. After a sandwich, a dog walk, and a few calls to people in Antigua to let them know we are going to be late, we boarded the plane. And we waited. And waited. The wind had changed directions just as we were getting ready for take off, so we had to switch runways – which led to a loooong line up of planes all needing to do the same thing. After another hour of waiting we were starting to get nervous yet again that we might miss our next connection. We figured there is nothing we can do at this point, so we sat back and enjoyed the flight. (Andrew’s note – "Fever Pitch" was the movie feature. It was unimaginably bad)

Finally, we started our decent to San Juan. This is undoubtedly the scariest decent I have ever experienced. As we started to land, we flew into a storm. The plane jerked up and down – it’s the closest thing to a roller coaster I’ve been on in a long long time. And the first time I actually needed my seatbelt. Kids are crying, people are screaming (me for one – I swear, the scream just slipped out!). Just as we get close to landing the plane it starts back up again. Apparently the pilot lost sight of the airport so he decided to not risk a landing. We hung out in the sky for a while waiting for the storm to calm down and tried again. This attempt was still pretty rocky but we managed to land the plane. We all clapped and cheered… we were on the ground. We wasted no time thinking about the near death experience we just had, because we had literally no time to spare if we were going to make our final flight. We took off down the airport, running all the way, only to hear our names being paged as a last call to board the plane. We boarded the shuttle and sunk into our seats on the 20 passenger plane. We were finally going to make it to Antigua. And to top it all off, just before we took off, we watched all six pieces of our luggage be put onto the plane. And, in the words of Almost Famous, "It’s all happening."