Dearest Rachel –
You might have heard me say it in passing on the video as we were walking off to the Cajun place down here, but it would seem that shortly after getting situated in the hotel, there was something called a “ground stop” at the airport, and indeed, at airports across the country. As far as I can tell – and that isn’t very far at all; when you’re on vacation, you aren’t supposed to be paying attention to the news – there were communication issues at air traffic control hubs in Boston, New York… and Chicago. I couldn’t ascertain whether it was due to radio issues or system software; these things are still being sorted out as I’m writing you about all this. What I do know is that air travel was grounded, nationwide, for most of yesterday afternoon, and into the evening.
This, however, was long after we’d landed here and were wandering around the environs for a decent meal. We missed the chaos by a matter of a few hours.
And it’s all due to the fact that I’ve picked up Dad’s old travel habit of taking off a day early and staying in the departure city for a day before a cruise, it would seem. His idea was generally that, rather than sweating out the possibility that the connection wouldn’t be made between the airport and the harbor in a timely manner, one should be able to relax a little bit between them, especially when dealing with large time-zone differences (Additionally, in the destination with those time-zone differences, like Europe, there was plenty to see in the destination city beforehand, so it wasn’t as if the day or two spent there beforehand was all rest, not by a long chalk). That’s how you and I travelled on these family vacations, and it’s how I’ve learned to travel with Daniel in the days since.
But it would seem that this time around, we didn’t just avoid tight schedules, we dodged a serious – borderline catastrophic – interruption by doing so. If our flight yesterday afternoon had been cancelled, what would have been our recourse? If we were flying out this morning, what about the scheduling cascade this incident caused? I mean, flights resumed somewhere between eight and nine yesterday evening, but there were four or five hours worth of flights to catch up on. And here we were, almost entirely ignorant of all this hullabaloo going on, since we arrived before everything went pear-shaped.
I hope I don’t sound smug about this, honey; rather, I’m just relieved to have dodged this bullet, to be honest. But I also wonder if this isn’t another of what you would have referred to as a “Godwink,” where He smiles at us and lets us go our merry way, escaping… not disaster, exactly, as no one was killed or even hurt, just badly inconvenienced.
Moreover, since the way we escaped the chaos was by following a pattern laid down by him, I wonder if Dad is smiling at us, as well. This is just the sort of thing that arriving early like this is meant to mitigate; except in this case, we avoided it altogether, thanks to the practice. He might look down with concern on those who are still scrambling to reschedule their trips down here, but I’d like to think that he’d see us enjoying ourselves, unencumbered by the concern of “how are we going to make it down there now?” and smiling about how maintaining the old family practice kept us out of that mess.
In which case, I suppose it’s beholden upon us to let them both know how grateful we are; to Dad, for inculcating a habit that got us down here before everything went haywire, and to our Father (who art in heaven) for keeping us not only safe and secure, but completely removed from the subsequent madness that we might otherwise have been caught up in.
So there you go; a story of a misadventure we didn’t have to take part in, and we are ever so grateful for that. Granted, it means that our ship won’t be leaving port for a couple of extra hours – in order to allow those who weren’t so fortunate (which might even include some of the guests of honor, who probably had to work yesterday) to catch the ship – but as inconveniences go, that’s nothing. We’re safe, we’re happy, and we’d better darn well be grateful for that.
