Kiss the Ground

Vista, originally uploaded by scootersbabygirl.

Yesterday morning the hotel’s automated phone service woke me up at the ungodly hour of 5:45 – I’d asked them to, of course, but I was in the depths of the best sleep I’d had since the day before I left on the Chicago trip.

I got up, got dressed, finished packing, and headed down to the lobby to wait for the shuttle, where I had the nicest conversation with a couple from Wisconsin, who told me that they love Vermont maple syrup and wish it could be sold more cheaply than it is, because they’d guzzle it out of a mug if they could.

I went through all the fun “are you sure you’re not a terrorist?” stuff and finally found my gate: note to the crew at United – can you please make the D for Gate 2D look more like a D on the ticket instead of a 0? That way some poor schmuck won’t wander around the very large O’Hare terminal for 30 minutes wondering why she can’t find Gate 20. Thanks!

It was the day for weird conversations for me, it seems, as next up was a conversation with a man who came from some other west coast state (I forgot – oops) and who was traveling to Vermont to meet a girl he’d met online. For the first time.

“Did you know that in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny they make fun of Vermont? Jack Black says ‘I don’t want to end up nowhere – like in Vermont.’ But what’s wrong with Vermont?!”

Oh my poor sweet boy. You’ll discover, when you get there, that Vermont is BEAUTIFUL, but that there’s NOTHING THERE.

Anyway, I head to board for my flight, as I was scheduled to board before him, and wish him luck. I find my seat and just get comfortable when who walks up beside me? The same guy! “Looks like we’re sitting together” he says. Great – way to make me feel bad that I switched places with a mother and her 4 year old who were seated apart from each other.

Most of the flight was pretty non-eventful. I shut the blind and he took a little nap. I got some work done and he kept looking at his watch. I read my book and he chatted it up with the guy in front of us. Everything was great.

Until, that is, we headed to land.

We were coming down and the captain comes over the speaker, in his very french accent, letting us know that we were making our “gradual descent into Burlington Airport”. Hooray!

Then we start going down – fairly fast, actually – and I thought we were all good. Until the plane started to shake so badly that everyone on the plane was getting white and grabbing their seats and the plane – as if by sheer will we could keep the plane in the air. The guy next to me had a shit-eating grin on his face as if he was thinking “it’s a good day to die!!”

Suddenly we started going back up again and the shaking stopped. Huh? Why were we going back up when we should’ve kept going down?

We climbed pretty high again and were in the air for at least 10 minutes before we started going down again. Finally we landed. The guy in front of my seat was a frequent flier and says that it was one of the top 5 worst landings of his life.

Great.

The stewardess – oops – flight attendant – gets on the intercom and says, “We’re sorry, ladies and gentlemen, obviously the captain encountered some turbulence.” to which I muttered “no, ya think?!” What happened to the days when the captain would get on the mic and let you know during the situation that you’re in turbulence, instead of letting you think that you were going to be crashing into the lake or something?

I got into the airport and rushed to my kids, overwhelmed with seeing them again, or with the fact that I didn’t die during that horrible landing, and bawled. I grabbed onto Scott not because I was happy to see him, but because my knees were giving out!

Scott, his sister and her bf were in the observation tower waiting for me, and up there you can hear the tower talking to the planes. Apparently there was a helicopter on the end of the runway, and that was why we initially went down and then had to go back up again.

On the way out we saw my seat mate. His arm was around a girl – I’m assuming, hopefully, that it’s the girl he came to meet – and they were walking out to the car.

“They’re gonna do it in the car and then, in a few days, he’s gonna catch an earlier flight outta VT as fast as his ass can book it.” my brother in law said.

God it’s good to be home!!!