TRAVEL ADVENTURES

Wow, what a frustrating experience! Air travel international. And we have to do it again inorder to get home in a month. Oh well, I will follow Scarlet O Hara's example: I'll think about it later.

The flight from Tri-Cities to Atlanta was cancelled due to severe weather in Atlanta, so Bill returned to the airport and we spent another night back home. Back to the airport the next day, making it to Amsterdam. We were given business class seating, which was most enjoyable. I was impressed with the comfort of the seats that allowed me to stretch out almost flat to sleep. Still didn't sleep but about three hours.

Our situation went sour again when we boarded our plane for Romania. We sat for five solid hours, not moving. The pilot kept asking for our patience while we waited for a place in line for de-icing for take off, which never came. We do not know what happened, but here are my suspicions.

Either the pilot did not want to fly to Romania for personal reasons, or the Ampsterdam airport was so disorganized due to the weather that they let us sit 5 hours being ignored by air traffic controlers. The pilot may not have felt competent to bring the plane down at the Bucharest airport in such dense fog, or he had some prejudice against flying to that destination or some unknown determination not to travel that day. Planes on our right and left were flying out, but not us.

There were a couple of angry men on board that spoke personally with the pilot. They had important business in Bucharest in the morning. Bet they missed the meeting. Two small children were on board and we never heard a sound from them. I couldn't believe it. The other travelers were pretty patient but bumbed out over the conditions we found ourselves in, as we were.

Can you imagine what it was like to join the people from 150 other flights who couldn't make their connection due to closed airports in England, Scotland? It was a zoo. And to make matters worse, one airport attendant would instruct us to go to this desk with 500 people waiting for re-ticketing, only to be told later by another person that we need to be somewhere else.

We were finally given accomodations in a hotel with no new flight assignment. They gave us a telephone number to call from the hotel for booking a new flight, but Tal couldn't get through to anyone. He finally called Kim at the Holston office and she quickly got us a flight to Bucharest through Paris. Others we talked to on our flight had still not been able to secure new flight plans when we boarded our plane the next day. THANK YOU KIM.

After the second night with even less sleep, I was beginning to feel pretty weary. Too much pulling luggage behind me at a fast pace. BUT WE MADE IT SAFELY, thanks to the skill of the pilot from France. He brought that plane down in thick fog. We couldn't see the runway until we were right on it. Just before getting off the plane I realized a head cold was asking permission to move in. Tal said his throat was a bit sore.

Of source, our luggage didn't arrive with us. It was left in Amsterdam on board our stalled plane or on the flight from Atlanta. We were met by friends and driven 3 hours to Braila, where Anna and Ben were ready to feed us. We got to our apartment about 10:00 p.m. We slept until 1:30 the next day. Tal nor I slept a wink all night this second night here. We finally got up at 5:30 a.m., fixed coffee and toast and are now pecking away at the computors. Still no luggage.

I hope we get ourselves in rhythm with our environment here in Brailia by this evening. I won't bore you will all the details every day. Good morning or good evening, which ever it is when you read this.