Saturday, September 19, 2009

Back at home

Yesterday was utter HELL.

I woke up at 5am, still hungover from the going away party the night before, to pack the last of my things. At 6 my even more hungover friends went with me to get breakfast, and as we sat in the cafe we looked outside, watching the sun rise, and started to feel really, really bad. Not sick bad, but scared bad. Because while there were clear skies over the town, the direction I needed to fly in was covered over in fog. So I get to the airport at 6:30, thinking I would be flying out of Skagway at 7. Except the plane that was supposed to take me to Juneau? It hadn't left Juneau yet. The weather was too bad.

See, in a tiny little town like Skagway, where the biggest plane that can land seats 12 people, bad weather means you don't get to fly. And in September in Alaska, there's bad weather almost every day. So even though the big Boeing planes in Juneau were taking off, the one that was supposed to come to Skagway to bring me back simply couldn't make it through.

I spent 2 hours napping in the airport. Then at 8:30, two of my coworkers with a 9am flight came in. They joined me on the couch to wait. By 10:30, my flight in Juneau had already left me. My coworkers were panicking about making their flight at 1. One plane had taken off from Juneau, made it about 15 minutes in the air, and had to turn around.

Luckily one of my coworkers, Megan, has connections with our often hard to reach managers. She called the boss up on his cell and said, "Steve Funk, get us out of this town!"

At noon we were seated on a ferry, luggage piled all around us in a cozy den, and headed away from our summer home. For the next 4 hours we played card game after card game, drinking beer, and when we ran out of beer we cracked open the bottle of whiskey in my suitcase. By the time we got off the boat in Juneau at 4, we were good and drunk.

We'd made friends on the boat, so we hitched a ride in the back of someone's truck to the airport. But all three of us had missed our scheduled flights, and the next one leaving for Seattle was at 8. So we sat in a covered bus stop and polished off the last of our whiskey.

Ten minutes after we'd loaded onto the plane, all three of us fell asleep on each others' shoulders and slept through the whole flight. The actual plane ride was only 2 hours and 30 minutes, but it had taken us 12 hours just to get 100 miles from Skagway to Juneau.

It took more time to fly from one state to another than to get to Peru in South America. Does anyone else see a problem with this??

1 comment:

Rose Gelder said...

ohh man that sucks that the stupid plane didnt get outta Juneau!! I'm thinking of getting the fast ferry to Juneau just so i dont have to worry about making it out. I love that Megan had a growler on her and you had the whiskey! And i was hungover enough that i got home, went to bed for two hours, got up deal with the westmark crap for a half hour, and went back to bed till 12:30 and then felt like shit the rest of the day. it was a good night.