Nightmare to Paris

Friends of ours are heading for Paris this week, for the first time with children in tow, which calls to mind the inaugural voyage my own family made together to the City of Lights...

Flying the entire family to Europe, my parents had purchased the cheapest tickets they could find, which meant connecting somewhere on the East Coast, rather than the direct, non-stop, overnight flight I had taken as a fifth grader. US Air had a beautiful sale that summer, and airfare for the entire family came in around $2000. (When I consider that I recently paid nearly that much for a single ticket to Europe, I am especially impressed.)

Afternoon storms are common in late June, and it was against the backdrop of one of them that we took off for Philadelphia. At some point during the flight my mother became agitated, checking her watch, whispering urgently to my father, and generally behaving strangely. Not long after I noticed this change in her demeanor, the captain came on the PA system and made the following announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed we’ve been circling for a while now. Unfortunately, there are strong storms over Philadelphia, there’s a ground stop at the airport, and we don’t have the fuel reserves to circle indefinitely. Rather than see what happens when the needle hits E, we’ll be diverting to Harrisburg. For those of you whose final destination was Harrisburg, it’s your lucky day!” The first three sentences may not be verbatim, but the last sentence, the one about the “lucky day,” that one still bounces around my mind, clear as the day it was spoken.

When we landed in Harrisburg, it was at a mostly deserted terminal, staffed by exactly one gate agent. She was not of the helpful variety. Shouting to make herself heard above the noise, she ordered us into lines and marched us, quite literally, onto a waiting Greyhound bus. We would not wait out the storm, we would not fly to Philly or to anywhere else. We would ride in a bus. Also, she told us, we would not stop in the bathroom, we would not purchase dinner, and we would not be reunited with our checked bags. I don’t believe any of these were options, as we hustled down one dank, cinder block corridor and up another. Checking our names off her checklist, this woman hurried us onto the bus and waved it off into one fierce storm.

As lightning flashed and streaked across the sky and hail pelted the windows, we passengers rode along, hungry, angry, and certain to spend the night on the hard, plastic chairs of the Philadelphia airport. While US Air was so cruel as to expect us to go without any kind of dinner, they were not so cruel as to give us a bus with no bathroom. Naturally, even this was not without flaws, as we discovered when my sister became locked in this tiny, stinking space. Onward we drove, through the Pennsylvania night, the crash of thunder mixed with a wail that I have always imagined was some not-so-distant tornado siren. Even a drive that feels interminable must come to an end and we soon piled out of the bus and into the jumble of irate passengers and soggy luggage haphazardly stacked curbside in the rain. 

Mercifully our bags were together and we staggered wet, hungry, and laden with suitcases into the airport. No fewer than several hundred passengers were packed into this space, half a dozen frenzied ticket agents sought to diffuse a day’s worth of insults, and the PA system squawked with unintelligible announcements. The time was 11:30, some three hours after our flight bound for Paris should have been wheels-up. And then, as though a gift from heaven, we heard the announcement: “Last call for boarding US Air flight 1778 to Paris. Last Call for boarding.” 

“THAT’S MY FLIGHT! HOLD THAT FLIGHT!” My mother shouted, elbowing aside the crowds and forcing her way to the counter. “I can hold it for 10 minutes, ma’am, and you’ll have to take your bags with you. It’s roughly a mile. Go! Run!”

He didn’t have to tell us twice. The four of us took off at a trot, willing the plane to be at the gate when we arrived. The security check point was closed; in the days before September 11, the workers just waved us through, encouraging us, “go, go, go!” Miracle of miracles, we made it onto the plane. Sometime after midnight we were officially bound for Paris.

Of course, nowadays, you'd simply be forced to spend a week in Harrisburg, so in hindsight I suppose we were lucky. What a thought.