MD-24

Night-m-air

Well, yes, we did make it back to Vancouver... by the skin of our teeth, and I don't want to bore anyone with a blow-by-blow telling of travel travails, but getting back here was an epic saga fit for nightmare channels 😄

Mexico was a charming host,
We both loved Guanajuato the most,
Dumped on, rained on, soaked and spun,
It was getting out of Mexico that was the least fun.

Leaving on a jet plane.

As we packed our belongings at our CDMX apartment in Guerrero, the sounds of this particular storm felt ominous; lightning and thunder right overhead, hail and brimstone with unbelievable volumes of vertical water. The skies seemed to have simply opened up. We were getting our final hurrah of the endless torrential rains we've been experiencing – just one more time, just for good measure! We hoped the worst had passed us, as we piled into the Uber... after all, our flight was at 1 am.

We were wrong.

It had rained 50 mm in 20 minutes, and the city was flooded, roadways were impassable, and gridlocked at every turn. We were lucky with a plucky and intrepid Uber driver, who kept finding new avenues and approaches to try to get us to Terminal 2, CDMX, and yet, the trip became an increasingly desperate affair. Narrowing and more harrowing as we got later and later, driving through flooded and gridlocked roadways everywhere!

Did I say the driver was plucky? Check this out...

We made it to CDMX Airport after holding our breath for over an hour, only to find a nightmare there, too. We found our way to the gate, and at 1:15, the pilot was still waiting for a crew member to arrive. They never showed, and at 2:30 am, our flight was cancelled. We were directed to make our way back out to the check-in desk to arrange an alternate flight. We were hopeful that we'd be re-assigned and on the next flight out to anywhere with a connection...

We were wrong.

The airport had shut down, and it was full-on pandemonium as all the cancelled passengers pooled into this one space, like a flood. The line-ups for rebooking were unreal - we later met a passenger on our same flight who had waited in this line-up for 10 hours to get rebooked.

We were infinitely luckier (pluckier?) while scoping out the situation, with a serendipitous opening of an opportune gap in the check-in entry area. We were pushed through that small breach like a fluid. We took full advantage of this fortunate gap and offered no resistance.

After a couple of hours, we had two options: a flight at 6 to LAX with no guaranteed seat or connection to YVR; or a flight at 9 with confirmed seats to Seattle and a connection to YVR. The LAX flight was tempting - good to get underway and outta there, but the prospect of getting stuck somehow at LAX with ICE and our shared foreign surnames in these troubled times loomed large.

The friendly lady agreed that confirmed seats would be better, we picked Seattle, and tickets were handed out like confetti. We are that much closer to home, we figured, and after a little shut-eye, would soon be underway...

We were wrong.

That flight to LAX made it out – with empty seats available, but the Seattle flight got cancelled at 8:30 am. What?! Wait?!! Why?!! We were directed to go back to the check-in desk area and get rebooked, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

😱

Nooo!

Luckily, we found another gap - we knew where to look - and made our way to the front of the check-in line. The only option on offer was a rebook on the 1 am flight direct to YVR the next day. Yrgh. We agreed to that, and wrangled two meal vouchers for the long day ahead.

Airport hotels were all full, including the pod space hotel, and we felt reluctant about going back into the city for fear of getting trapped and not getting back. We contemplated a trip to a mineral bath in the area, but we had no adventuring left in us. We spent the day at the Starbucks, which had a sort of covered outdoor area and comfy seats...

We made the best of it. We met fellow travellers and exchanged horror stories - 10 hours in line, 12 hours in line, multiple cancellations like us, one person said their entire trip from Mumbai to London to NY to CDMX had been a series of cancelled flights, and now here we all were. The common ground of the stranded...

It was sunnier in the morning as we sat around, and napped, and ate, and sat, and milled around, and read, and sat, and wandered around. Spirits lifted slowly till I tried the coffee, which set me back to grumpy-ville. Some good music helped correct that. Time moved glacially, but it did creep along at its petty pace, and eventually, eventually, it was time to head to the gate for the third time for our 1 am flight. It usually rained in the late afternoons, but on this day it hadn't... perhaps we were getting lucky.

We were wrong.

As we started boarding the plane, finally, finally, after all those interminable hours, it started to rain lightly. Spitting and teasing, as it had done that earlier, too. By the time we were all seated and ready to roll, though, yep, you guessed it, it had started pouring once again. Not a little rain - a lot of rain, with thunder and lightning and buckets of water coming down...

We stayed there, then, all squished into our little seats, the plane still parked at the gate, all waiting for that break in the rain that was bound to come. It was bound to stop soon; that was a lot of water that had been coming down. It's bound to run out and drain itself, right? Then we'd be on our way - finally, right?

We were wrong.

After a few tepid announcements that we would soon be getting that clearance and go-ahead from the tower, and that we would soon be departing... I fell asleep in my seat, dreaming I would awake as we landed in Vancouver.

I slept soundly. I've always been able to sleep easily, even in uncomfortable spaces like this, squeezed into a plane seat. It's one of the few gifts I received from my father. Maybe it's the most valuable of the small smattering of things I consider a valuable inheritance - people were always envious of his ability to sleep anywhere. He often told me that, as a young child, my grandparents didn't have enough money for school, and after his elder brother died, he became the eldest and had to quit school and go to work in the cotton ginnery, where he learned to sleep on a gunny sack on the floor. I didn't come by this gift through such hardships. I just sleep easily, as I say, a gift from my dad, one I'm simply grateful for.

I awoke some time later by the stirrings and commotion. As I looked around, I saw that people were getting up and gathering things from the overhead bins. Wow, what? Were we already in Vancouver? How awesome! How cool, had we slept through everything?! Yay!

We were wrong.

Wait a minute... It was still dark out? How come? What! - We were still parked at the same gate. It was 5:30 am. What - we should have landed by now. Wait, what's this, we are being kicked off the plane??

😱

Nooo!

The airport had been shut down yet again for a second night in a row, and since there was no crew at the gate, they had kept us on the plane. When the pilot's shift was over, and the new crew arrived at the gate, they had to deplane us.

There was a rumour circulating that when a fresh pilot arrived, we would be re-seated back on the plane to continue. No one believed anything anymore. No one knew what to do, no clarity, no announcements - just a lot of one-on-one haggling. We hung in there in the hope that it might be the case, and sure enough, a false start or two later, a trusty pilot appeared to great cheering of the crowd... and in time we were all re-boarded.

We sat there again on the tarmac for a while, waiting and waiting, nerves shot, afraid to hope. This time, we were waiting for the ground workers with their magic wands. Those little red sticks that point out the way like little divining rods. They showed up an hour later, and slowly but surely, we inched our way eventually to the front of the line of the only working runway, for landing and departing... surely this time... right?

We Were Right.

We taxied, got airborne and were underway. It was a direct flight, so barring any new madness, we would eventually land in Vancouver. I ate the scrambled eggs they offered – huevos revueltos – and promptly fell asleep and woke up to the blue skies over Vancouver.

Over 20,000 people were affected by the flooding at CDMX Airport, with its two-day record-breaking rainfall since 1952. Planes were diverted in all directions - one from Toronto flew as far as Houston before turning around and going back.

Climate Change? Global warming? Euphemisms.

Spanish/Italian

As I had feared would happen in Mexico, when I attempted to utter any Spanish, Italian would come flowing out of my mouth instead. I gave up trying to stem the tide, and it somehow worked out.

There's an Italian expression, 'Sfigato' - It's a common term and it's used liberally, like salt, sprinkled on anything.

"Sfigato" The Literal Meaning
The term sfigato comes from the word sfiga, which itself is slang for bad luck. Sfigato, then, originally meant someone unlucky. But over time, its meaning has broadened and evolved... Today, when someone is called sfigato, it often implies more than just being unlucky... Wanted in Rome

I wondered if that might be the case for us on this trip... maybe we were I Due Sfigati... and the sfiga had followed us around like a bad cloud, along with the rain 😄

☔️

Che Sfiga!

The Greening

One good thing about having this particular sfiga – it started raining in Vancouver after we landed – is that the landscape around us has been green and verdant, like one of Bosco Sodi's works at Casa Wabi Sabino...

As always, thanks for reading and indulging!
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