OK, from nightlight (yesterday’s post) let’s go back to Buzzy’s dislike of night flights. (Recall how he mentioned on his China postcard that he wasn’t too thrilled that we were scheduled to fly at night after we had toured the Terra Cotta Soldiers’ exhibit.)
Turns out that his concerns about that particular night flight were valid because the 2 to 3 hour scheduled trip ended up taking us several hours to execute. Here’s the story.
We were scheduled to fly from Xian to Nanjing. A direct flight would have taken approximately 2 hours but ours had a stop in Chuzhou a city that was very close to Nanjing. (In the U.S. it would be like flying from Boston to DC with a stop in Philly.)
Our flight out of Xian was delayed such that we were over an hour late in getting underway. Then we were delayed some more before we were allowed to land in Chuzhou.
Once on the ground at Chuzhou, the flight attendants instructed those of us continuing to Nanjing to remain on the plane while the other passengers deplaned and new ones got on.
Somewhere in this churn, a passenger booked to head to Nanjing with the rest of us from Xian, got off the plane and did not re-board. My guess is that he was running late, did the math that he could rent a car and be where he needed to be in the Nanjing area sooner than waiting for the flight to resume. The only problem with his action was that he had checked a bag. When he bolted and left his bag stowed away on our plane, it triggered all sorts of security concerns among the airline folks.
After waiting an extended period of time to see if the dude was just late in getting back onboard, the airline folks then proceeded to move the plane away from the terminal out to some remote runway where they unloaded all of our checked luggage onto the tarmac. I remember sitting on the plane watching them do this and wondering what the hell were they up to. Well, I soon found out.
They made all of us deplane and then fumble around in the dark to locate and identify our bags so that they could isolate the one unclaimed bag that the gone dude had left behind. This of course took another hour or so before we re-boarded and were able to resume our trip. Bottom line, it was close to 11 p.m. before we arrived at our final destination in Nanjing.
We retrieved our luggage, left the airport on a bus and checked into a nearby hotel. Buzzy was busy mixing a drink when we got a knock on our door and it was our tour guide. She informed us that we would not be staying in this hotel and for us to be downstairs in 20 minutes to relocate to another one. Turns out that some of the folks in our group had raised so much fuss over the conditions of this particular hotel that the guide decided to relocate us elsewhere.
We re-packed and joined our fellow tourists in the lobby to bus to another hotel. By the time we made it to our room in hotel #2 it was well after midnight.
As we tucked in for the night and turned out the lights Buzzy said “See why I don’t like flying at night?” I laughed and pointed out that all of our delays and problems had transpired on the ground and had little to do with the actual flight itself. He responded “Doesn’t matter. It’s always better to fly during the daytime.”
Joni’s misgivings about her night flight had more to do with a busted love affair than Buzzy’s overall dislike of night flying. However, her line “I shouldn’t have gotten on this flight tonight” kept running thru my mind the whole time that Buzzy and I were trying to get from Xian to Nanjing.