Connections

I realized it had been a long time since I had posted a story from my life, and I thought I better tell the story about the worst connections I ever had with an airline, or in the case I am going to tell you about airlines.

I was flying home from Paris on an airline that the only thing I remember about its name, was it was a cat, lion or maybe a jaguar.  Any way I knew it was going to be a unique trip when I had to load my own bags on the airplane.

The first stop on my journey home was in Malta, if you do not know where Malta is, it is smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean. The main airport is very small and I was supposed to have a three hour layover. It ended up about five hours, and the air conditioning did not work in the terminal. It was so hot in the airport, and because we were on an international flight they would not let us out of the terminal. Finally, when we left Malta it was after ten at night.

The next stop was Belize City. When we touched down there it was around three in the morning and I had missed my connection and the only thing open in the terminal was a bar that had seven stools. The only other people there were a bartender that looked about fourteen, a woman that looked about eighty and some guy that looked like the Latin Norm from Cheers. I had been drinking a lot of coffee and I had to go to the bathroom at a regular interval. Every time I went to the bathroom some guy would bump into me and try to pick my pocket. At about ten that morning I got a flight into San Salvador that would get me into Miami that night.

When we got into San Salvador that afternoon, the only people besides me and the people from my flight were a bunch of soldiers from the El Salvador military. Somebody had phoned in a bomb threat, and they had cancelled all flights until the next day. The military piled me and about thirty other people into a dump truck that smelled like bananas, and drove us to a hotel called the Hotel Americana, run by Miss El Salvador 1972. A wonderful lady who took us out for supper at a steak joint called the American Cowboy. I had a T-bone the size of a plate, a plate of French fried potatoes, and a giant lettuce salad. When we were done she took us out for ice cream. What a sweet lady.

When I woke up at two that next morning in the bathroom I hated her. I was so sick and I had realized that they had washed the salad in bad water and I had got a parasite. I spent the next six hours in the bathroom until they took us back to the airport where we got a flight on the Costa Rican national airline. They sat me between two houses from the University of Miami. It was the flight from hell.

I arrived in Miami at four and Cedar Rapids at ten that night. That flight from Paris was the longest four days of my life.