Travels Concluded

I’ve neglected the end of our travel story since life has been fairly busy since we arrived back in Maine. Obviously, we did make it safely from the Bahamas to Portland, but not without a few travel difficulties. Of course, when I’m traveling, difficulties and delays are more the norm than the exception, so I guess I should have known…

I left off the last post sitting at the Nassau airport, waiting for my missing suitcase. Our flight was at 2:45 p.m., we knew we needed plenty of time to get through customs and the suitcase was meant to arrive at 12:30. Well, 12:30 came and went with no sign of the suitcase, and as the clock approached 1 p.m., Mark decided to go to the luggage carousel at the domestic terminal and see if he could locate the bag. I sat and waited, watching the minutes tick by and wondering how long we should make before deciding to leave the suitcase behind to avoid getting stuck in Nassau indefinitely.

Fortunately, Mark found the suitcase as it was coming off a plane from Eleuthera, and we managed to get in the customs line by 1:30. The line wasn’t necessarily moving quickly, but it wasn’t terribly slow, either, so we made it to our terminal with time to spare. Our flight boarded and took off on time, so we made it to Charlotte with an hour to get to our connecting flight.

The flight from Charlotte to Portland also took off on time and all seemed to be going well until about half an hour in, when we saw the flight attendant rushing toward the back of the plane with an oxygen tank. A few minutes later, the pilot made an announcement that there was a medical situation and we were going to make an emergency landing in Richmond, Virginia. We’d already reached cruising altitude, so the descent was fast and intense – definitely a little scary. We made it safely to the ground, though, and there were several emergency vehicles waiting to greet our plane. The EMTs boarded as soon as they could, and after a few minutes they trooped off the plane carrying a woman who was moaning about something hurting. We never got a full story on it, but apparently the woman passed out while we were in the air. Mark thinks he heard the word asthma, but I’m not sure if that was the culprit or not. Fortunately, there was a doctor on board who started treating her and who advised the pilot to land.

We discovered that the only quick thing about an emergency landing is the descent – we ended up being on the ground for more than two hours while the plane got more fuel, someone restocked the emergency equipment, and the flight crew filled out paperwork. Once we took off again, we had a somewhat bumpy ride to Portland, where we landed around 10:30 p.m. Our luggage came, though very slowly, and we arrived at our house at almost 11:30 p.m., after expecting to be home by 9.

So ends the story of our vacation. We had a wonderful time, and when I have a few extra minutes on my hands, perhaps I’ll write a post with more reflections, as most of what I’ve written so far has been simply description. I’m also hoping to post about some of the things we have going on now that we’re home, particularly in terms of Noah’s Law. For now, though, I need to figure out what is going on with my work e-mail so I can achieve some level of productivity today…