jducoeur

(I was reminded today that, while I've told this story many times, and a fair number of you have heard it, I don't recall ever writing it down. So...)

No shit, there I was -- on the tarmac in St. John's, Newfoundland.

The year was 1993, during the reign of Tsurunaga and Genevieve, and the Shire of Ar n-Eilean-ne had decided to hold an East Kingdom University.

Now, the thing about Ar n-Eilean-ne is that it is the northernmost point of the East Kingdom. And the easternmost point. Indeed, it is more or less the north-easternmost point of North America: St. John's is way out there. It's in the East Kingdom, but I believe it's technically closer to England than to Boston. It's a serious trip.

Of course, they invited everyone in the Kingdom to join them for University; of course, very few folks from the US actually came. In practice, IIRC, the American contingent wound up being four Carolingians and the King.

The event was delightful. My top (if by now rather vague) memories were discovering that five-year-old stockfish (from the autocrat's mother's larder) can make a truly fabulous dinner when the cook knows what they are doing, and His Majesty leading everybody on a small pub crawl afterwards.

So -- no shit, there I was the following morning, at the airport in my plane home. The flight up had been uneventful, and I fully expected the same to be true of the return. And that was true for the first half of the flight.

Down we flew, stopping at Yarmouth Airport (more or less the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia) for refueling, and thence on to Boston. All seemed to be going fine, and after a few hours we were approaching Logan Airport.

We began to circle for our descent. And circle. And circle.

After about half an hour of this, the pilot came on the PA, apologized for the delay, and announced that free drinks would be provided for all passengers. A small voice at the back of my head said, "Uh oh".

We continued to circle for a while, collectively partaking of the free spirits, and the passengers at the back began to get a little boisterous. I learned that they were a women's bowling team -- precisely why they had been visiting St. John's I don't know, but they greatly appreciated the booze.

Another half hour later, the pilot came on the PA again, terribly apologetic, and explained that we would be unable to land at Boston Logan. Boston was fogged in, and while that would normally not be a big deal (because instrument landing), the Tall Ships were currently in the harbor, and there was a non-zero chance of clipping a mast during the landing. We would be seeking other airports to land at.

Twenty minutes or so later, and the mood was getting a bit uglier. The pilot came back on the PA, and the ladies at the back began to vigorously heckle his French accent. He was terribly apologetic, but there was an additional problem -- none of the airports that were nearby and still open at this hour on a Sunday evening were international airports: they didn't have Customs, so we couldn't land at them. So we would have no choice but to fly back to Yarmouth.

An hour or two of backtracking later, the pilot came back on the PA, terribly apologetic, to explain that Yarmouth was now also fogged in. To this day I'm not quite sure why that mattered -- I halfway suspect that Yarmouth airport just didn't want to deal with us -- but we were going to have to keep going.

And so it was that, eight hours after boarding the plane, we landed -- at the next gate over from the one that we had originally taken off from. No worse the wear, but collectively cranky and tired as only a group of fifty strangers stuck in close quarters in an existential nightmare can be.

(Yes, the airline put us up for the night, and I got home the next day: bigger plane, clear skies, and as uneventful as I had originally expected. But it says something that that flight is my dominant memory of the trip.)