Back from the wedding
Oct 27, 2003
Had a wonderful time at Joseph and Karan’s wedding. I’ll get the pictures up so those of us who used digital cameras can exchange snaps. Got home late last night, really late, six or seven hours late. The wildfires in Southern California threatened a FAA control center which was evacuated (rumor at the gate was that cars in the parking lot of the center were on fire). The plane for our departing flight arrived two hours late in Oakland- giving us hope- but there was no crew who could legally fly it. The pilots, I’m told, are limited to ten hours of flight and the available pilots were in Long Beach. But all the flights out of Long Beach were grounded due to smoke. You can imagine the crowd at the airport as people arrive for their 5:45pm to New York only to find that the 1:10pm still had not left and no one could not get anything but "indefinitely delayed". We were getting better news from the people with laptops and wireless handhelds than we did from the desk attendants. Investigations of other flights and carriers was fruitless. I guess hundreds of pissed off New Yorkers hanging around eating free snacks and drinking complimentary bottled water was too much and the gate security people brought up uniformed police to keep an eye on things. Unsurprisingly, nothing was going on except a lot of exasperated people slouching in vinyl chairs, leaning on walls and camping on floors chatting about what brought them to California and the police left after ten minutes. Finally, after sitting around the airport for six hours, our carrier got a fresh crew and we took off.