coexistapart's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JFK-St. Kitt's-JFK all in 12 hours Today was exhausting. We left for JFK at 9:30am, a little late in mind considering that St. Kitt's is, technically, an international flight. But considering Melinda's from NYC, and she knows what she’s doing, I just wasn't going to get involved. Once we got stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, it was surprisingly easy to let go; I was positive that we were going to miss the flight, and Melinda being the lawyer that she is I just planned on letting her deal with it. We arrived at 10:25am (with a 11:15 departure) and they sent us to priority kiosks to check in; the kiosks refused to work, further compounding my belief that there is no way AA was going to let us on the flight. Finally a clerk checked us in; thankfully she didn't blink twice at the weight of my bag, magically 45 lbs. We went to security, where we had a longer wait. We cleared security, and just had enough time to walk all the way infield to the gate, tag-team watching our bags and going to the ladies' room, before essentially just boarding the flight. The flight was very, very empty... I would say not even one person per row per side of the plane in economy. I think I saw one NJ couple, a pilot, and a random business man in first class. Everyone had rows to themselves; I had salad bar from Whole Foods for lunch. Stupidly in the crazy health-conscious streak that I've been having, I didn't think to buy M&Ms. We were delayed for takeoff (or at least our time slot was later than the 12:10 departure indicatd) and so I had already finished my wakame, fig & prosciutto, curried turkey, raisin & cashew salads before takeoff. It was the right amount of food that I was *just* resorting to gum when we started circling St. Kitt's. Now I have to preface this part of the story with the precursor that the pilot, on departing JFK, tells us how great it is that we are able to fly down to St. Kitt's because there's this hurricane (Omar) approaching way over to the West, and it's going to cross by the Virgin Islands, but thankfully we're leaving today so it's not going to affect us. The flight down is about four hours. Once you fly out of JFK, you are basically over the Atlantic the entire way, so I shut my window shade to watch "Charlie Wilson's War" and read magazines. However during the couple of times I did lift the shade to see what was up, I noticed we were flying through dense white (rain filled?) cloud. When we get to the Carribean, the cloud breaks several times, I see beautiful lush islands surrounded by gorgeous aquamarine waters. I also see huge needles of thunder striking down through earth. We circle, we circle, we try different headings, but probably never really break 10,000 feet. To me I'm thinking back to an Air China flight from Beijing (yeah, I know) that landed in HK through some stormy weather, but truth be told as much as I've flown I don't really have any basis on which to analyze bad weather. So we divert to San Juan, Puerto Rico which is interesting because it's a larger island that looks like generic America flying in...that is until you see the huddle of corrugated iron shanties just shy of the airport fence. We land. You can tell by the outside of the airport (it's rusted, windswept, kind of ex-Soviet honestly) that this is not a high traffic airport. The first hint should have been that they did not let us deplane; I had assumed I had time to by some M&Ms and stretch my feet before they put us on a different, scheduled AA flight to St. Kitt's. They didn't let us deplane while they tried to "figure out solutions" during which point the St. Kitt's airport closed, due to weather conditions, as did every other major airport in the eastern Carribean. When they told us that the flight was returning to JFK, my initial inclination was to get off in Puerto Rico, regardless of what kind of sense that may or may not have made. They were not allowing people to retrieve their bags, but enough people were irritated enough that they would have made do. Now we've just returned from the airport, 14 some-odd hours later. We talked about rescheduling the flight, but I didn't rush to get in line and the slots ahead of us were filled considering that most of the flights later this week were already moderately filled. It would have been Friday for a connecting flight & Sunday for a direct point. Given that Big has called Marriott and they had already cancelled my reservation and indicated that they would refund the non-refundable fare in its entirety, then it just didn't make sense to try and go back down for a few days. Plus, I certainly wasn't jealous of the folks who were planning to come back to the airport early the next morning, to get on a flight that was going to try and land on the hope that the St. Kitt's airport opened at noon. Ha! Good luck with that. I know how that's going to end, and it's going to be long and exhausting even if you DO end up on in St. Kitt's. 12:12 a.m. - 2008-10-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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