Flying Away

Tuesday, June 5, 2007
A friend from church picked us up at 6:30 a.m. L was the only one up to see us off. (I’m sure she woke up Auntie N as soon as the door closed behind us.) We got to the airport in plenty of time to learn that our 8:30 flight was delayed til 10:15. We had a leisurely breakfast at the Prickly Pear and waited. And waited. After we finally boarded the plane, we waited a bit more for permission to take off. Thunderstorms were expected in the Newark area, so all the planes to that area were delayed by Air Traffic Control. The flight included views of the Rocky Mountains and a couple Great Lakes.

We were in a holding pattern for quite a while somewhere near Newark, still due to the expected thunderstorms. Eventually we approached the airport, and on the way we got an aerial view of the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty.

We had expected to spend three hours at the Newark airport, but the delay meant that we had about ten minutes after we landed to rush through the aiport and find our departure gate. The restaurants at Newark smelled delicious as we ran past them. We reached our gate, waited perhaps fifteen minutes, boarded the airplane….and waited forty five minutes for approval to take off. A flight attendant handed out newspapers to all who wanted them. Our newspaper had an article about flight delays at US airports. Newark had the least number of on-time flights of any airport in the country.

Darkness fell soon after the airplane took off, so we didn’t have a glimpse of the Atlantic until sunrise.