Apparently the flight cancelled while they were actually on it. On the runway. Waiting for take-off. Mid-sentence, even. Captain welcoming everyone on board after such a long delay, apologizing on behalf of of the airline, relaying flight details, cruising altitude, the weather conditions in New York and–oops, what’s this? “Well, folks, uh….Looks like they’ve…uh…cancelled this flight.” Mid-sentence. I didn’t know they could do that.

Ellie and I had dropped our three travelers at the airport in Portland, Maine, after a week’s vacation in Acadia. They were flying home, we were going on to visit Mamie at the lake, driving my trusty little truckster (eventually) home to Virginia filled with stuff they didn’t want to carry. (Suitcase containing overnight items you might need, should you get stranded in your departure or connection city while the airlines decide whether they are going to make your day by getting in the air or do all that other stuff we’ve grown used to.) Actually, I don’t fault the airlines but the complexities of air travel–yes, weather, yes, hurricane, and all that. Plus one of them (ours) still hadn’t ironed out a few software kinks and was probably a little distracted by their class action lawsuit, so there’s that.

In any case, my three were greeted 10 minutes after arriving to the gate (and 50 minutes down the road for their ride) with a three-hour delay. That’s a kick in the pants when you’ve padded your time and all your gear is not with you. So they settle in with some serious dink time. But not all of them. Will has travelled this way before. So has Sophie. They got stranded in Hartford last summer getting home and had a crash-course (oops, wrong word) in Plan B. Will knows what to do. He’s walking the long corridor of this tiny airport (“Jetport” it’s called), gate crashing, looking for flights that land within 100 miles of Richmond, checking take-off times, assessing delays. He’s on the phone with Delta, seeking options and ways home. His situation, I must add, was made a little more dire by the hard-stop of 4:30 the next morning, when he was being picked up to ride a train into NYC for another fun vacation with his girlfriend and family. Wait a minute, let me understand….you’re about to get stranded in your connecting city, the very place you’re riding a train to 24 hours from now? The later he gets home (original time 6:17 pm), the harder that turn-around will be. It’s been a long, sweaty week of hiking and outdoor activity in Maine rain. He’s going to the Big Apple with his girl friend–a “nice clothes, dinner and sightseeing” kind of place. What he got his eye on? The washing machine in our downstairs laundry room.

As for my part, the calling/ texting/ scheming of the next half day, up to and including the Captain’s “enjoy your peanuts” announcement, rivaled what must have been going on in flight decks up and down the east coast. My phone fairly blew up as the kids texted me with every possible plan and Bill called and I tried to research rental cars and Amtrak schedules and NYC hotels and every possible iteration for my peeps. I write this as if there weren’t hundreds, thousands of stranded and unhappy travelers. In every airport and transportation mecca in the path of the impending storm. Thanks, L’il Debby. So a little perspective does show that these kinds of hold ups and delays are not a disaster. It’s not even an inconvenience. It’s an adventure.

But my people don’t want an adventure. They’ve had eight days of a family vacation, hiking up and down Acadia’s mountains, in the rain or threatening weather that came back around with sunshine the minute you’d fully altered or cancelled your plans. Sleeping in the rent-a-closet (mommy tends to be on the cheap side when travelling) and cooking in a provisional kitchen with a plug-in burner. My people have had plenty of adventure. They want to go home.

Ellie and I are headed in that direction by car, with a stop-over in Massachusetts to visit Mamie. Good idea, since Ellie is leaving for two years this September to pursue her dreams. As in, one- way ticket to Padua, Italy. The return was/is so unknown we didn’t bother to book one. Actually, my flight is also one-way to Richmond a day from now, cleverly planned to get me home for appointments and such the end of the week and to give Ellie a little time with her grandmother. She will drive the car home five days from now with all the luggage they kissed goodbye in the Portland airport. You see? Travel planner stays up late at our house. All intricately planned and loose ends tied. Combine that with the price sticker of $840 for all seven flights that make up this family vacation and you will get the picture. I got this on lock-down.

So, unfortunately, does Delta. No more planes leaving PWM tonight. I’m on call number 37 from one of my peeps. You can imagine after six hours of flight delays back at the airport, things are getting a little tense. “What ifs” run rampant, everybody wearing a little thin. Sophie, for one, is desperate to get home. She has five appointments stacked over the next two days, count them —five–all in prep for moving out of state to graduate school at the end of August. All carefully placed on her few days home because she doesn’t actually live there. She still lives and works in Charlottesville, and so scoring a doc appointment or a dentist important is near impossible (minus the “near”). Again, give the personal secretary a gold star for all the planning and putting into place, but dear ol’ Delta is about to remove these best-laid plans. One of them is the all-elusive “physician’s” signature on her vax record so she can enroll in classes at the university. Been chasing that thing all summer. The other is dentist appointment booked nine months ago. Say no more. Transportation gridlock got nothin’ on our neighborhood dentist.

Desperate to exhaust every option, she broaches a crazy plan with me, me who has just pulled into mom’s driveway in Massachusetts, three hours away and that much removed from their plight tonight, to drive back and get them (yes, I literally haven’t turned the car off and she is proposing this) so that they can fly out of a different airport tomorrow. There’s nothing out of Portland before Friday. No rental cars, it sounds like, in the entire state. In truth, I’d already booked her a ticket tomorrow out of Hartford (Hey. Can’t get much by me in disaster land. 24 hours to cancel, mind you, so why not. Tonight, our “alternate plans” have all the staying power of your next breath).

It seems like a crazy plan but soon starts to rise to the top of the possibility pile as the only one that will work. The one that will solve the most problems. What are the problems? Get Sophie and Bill home. Get Will to New York City in such a way that doesn’t involve him sleeping in JFK tonight or making his sketchy way from the airport to Penn Station (a surprisingly complicated endeavor based on my research), preserve Ellie’s visit with her grandmother, and lastly, keep the car in New England to drive her home. And me? Well, I may be so whittled and worn by the end of this that I won’t need transport at all. Remember, I still have a one-way on Thursday morning. It was booked in April when hurricane Debby wasn’t even a twinkle. But right now I find I’m back on the Mass Pike headed for Maine, ETA 9 pm. The same airport I dropped off my crew at 12:30, time nicely padded, lovely city unseen and seaside walking trail un-walked because there wasn’t time. Yes, I am driving back there to rescue my peeps.

Minus one. In the many iterations and alterations of the “Burks Travel Home,” Will discovers a Southwest Airlines flight that is boarding soon for Baltimore. Baltimore?? That’s not even our state. “Yeah but it’s south, Mom,” says Soph on the phone. I’m desperate. I gotta get home tonight,” So she does. She pays the difference, whisks up her gear and is (I imagine as I drive) gone with the wind. Lovely young man driving up to BWI at midnight to retrieve her. Tonight, all of our hours come in threes. Now I share more than admiration and genuine care for this sweetheart. I share a rainy, late night six-hour turn around trip and a tank (or two) of gas. It’s Ok, I think as I drive the same potholes and puddles I’ve only just passed hours ago going the other direction, love takes you furthest of all. I don’t care about the weather. I don’t care about the distance or the time. My flight crew has definitely exceed its logged hours. But you know what? I. Don’t. Cancel.

Sophie told me later that when she boarded the flight there were so many empty seats because that flight, too, had been seriously delayed and passengers had all abandoned ship or plane or gone out to hitch home or rent up the last car in the surrounding 50 miles. So the captain told them to literally, take the first available and buckle in. If we don’t leave in 15 minutes they’re going to ground this plane. At which point she with her little worn-out, woebegone carry-on all alone on this ship she has just catapulted onto–she starts to wonder if flying tonight was even a good idea at all. Happy ending number 1: It was. It gets her into BWI and they manage the drive down 95 in the middle of night, bound for the Burk Motel and Gus and all that is good about home base.

I am so grateful I could cry, but I am still both-hands-on-the-wheel, bearing my two remaining travelers home to mom’s house, where they are not. She and Ellie are gone to the lake, original plan in tact, though they’ve left a house key under the stone cat on the porch and a quart of milk for the morning. Will, in a stroke of sheer genius and forward thinking, has booked himself a one-way train ticket (brilliant!) from a cornfield-commuter Park-N-ride lot near here and will catch the train coming from Boston to New York in the morning. He will pull into Penn Station about 40 minutes ahead of the family he is meeting. The very same place. With a roof over it, with people in uniforms and–other than navigate the crowds to find his friend–he will not need to take another step to begin his planned addendum to his vacation. Well done, travellin’ boy. Happy ending part 2: It works! After getting in after midnight, running his laundry till 2 am, breakfast at 6:30 of whatever I could scrounge in a closed up-for the-summer- kitchen (Will ate an entire pot of cooked oatmeal) and a back in the car for 7, we put him on an on-time train and off he went for his five-day extravaganza in NYC.

Now it’s our turn. Bill has booked us new tickets on a different airline tonight and I am getting out of my Breeze Airways flight, which miraculously you can do. We will fly home together. We are going to make a day of it at the lake, enjoy what’s left of the 36-hour visit I had planned there. Mom and Ellie have cooked up a delicious breakfast when we arrive, including what may as well be nectar of the gods: hot coffee. Only then do I finally sit. And relax. The day before, which only just ended at 2’oclock this morning, I drove 12 hours and (while Ellie was actually doing the driving for the first Portland to Southwick leg) managed the ever-changing travel plans of my little band of three. Now, praise God, they are each where they need to be. Delta is cooking up my refund and all is well. Or soon will be.

The pictures I post on FB later that night are from when Bill and I, beyond exhausted and travel weary, got dropped off for an on-time flight at Bradley Field, which changed its mind, as they often do, after your ride has left and messed with our connection just before boarding. Once again, buckled in and awaiting take-off: “Well folks, looks like…blah blah blah door going to blow off…blah 30 minutes.” LOOKS like??! I’ll give you looks like. We are. Delayed again. Luckily Bill had picked a longer connection which, let’s face it, I may do forever from now on. Still. I’ve seen how quickly and things can change. So there we are, strapped in and sitting on the runway, waiting for “just another 30 minutes.” I am, thanks to Bill’s experience, way more distrusting of captains’ chipper “short delays” than I used to be. Unwarranted, as this one gets us in the air in 29. Whew. But when we get to Charlotte (Yesss— fly south to fly north. I know it makes no sense. Neither does the sign that reads “boarding in 20 minutes” while tired late-night travelers who have been bumped to the point of being emotionally bruised and who are probably on their “low batt mode” by this point, are peering out the huge plate glass window to the dark tarmac and all the activity out there on this rainy night where I can plainly see our empty jetway, accordion-stuck to nothing, cords hanging, wires slack. There’s no plane. There is NO plane. We’re not really flying tonight. The crew and staff have simply run out of energy to tell us. We stare at the screen. “Boarding in 20 minutes…Boarding in 10…Boarding in 5…” Their signage advances but nothing else does. Pilot probably already taking off his shoes at home somewhere, settlin’ in for some late night TV. They just haven’t told us.

So that’s the picture I posted. A big ol’ shiny white plane with a tiny pilot and co-pilot peeking out the windows like Fisher-price people in that vintage toy airplane. Because it was 11:15 after the longest day, and the “9:20” out of Charlotte to Richmond was no where to be found. Just an empty plane parking spot around which plenty few airplanes taxied in and out of the surrounding gates as we sat waiting. But not ours. Just the jetway to no where. Until, what to my wondering eyes did appear, but another plane nose slowly turning, turning… in our direction (!!), and staying in our direction, and pulling in, straight ahead. Never a better sight, to be sure. The relief of fellow travelers around us is palpable. Even the announcement over the intercom sounds a little perkier. Remember, they’ve been announcing cancellations and delays for two days straight, looking out over a sea of stalled travelers who don’t seem to move or get replaced by a new set, and they’ve got a long day ahead when Debby finally does get here (tomorrow’s predicted to be worse). But yes, Virginia, there is a flight home.

I don’t even listen to the captain’s announcement. I am buckled, praying and powering us home with a wish as large as my tired heart. Happy ending part 3: being that part of the story where we fly home, just as normal as the day is long, and pick up the little blue car Bill and the kids left at RIC when they flew out 10 days ago at the crack of dawn. I have the strongest urge to kiss the ground at Richmond airport. Instead, I wheel my busted little carry-on behind me, bee-lining for the airport shuttle, giving thanks, giving thanks, grateful beyond measure and now – yes, you guessed it, just another 30 minutes drive home. For this trip, originally billed as a hiking vacation, counting steps is child’s play. We’re counting unintended miles–the ones that you didn’t plan, didn’t count on, but you made them anyway. So many miles. No surprise then, that these are the miles that bring you closer. These are the miles that (eventually) bring you home.

Photo by Abdel Rahman Abu Baker on Pexels.com