Home again, ho

It was kind of okay when Delta 73 was three hours late in taking off due to a problem with air pressure in the cabin. The captain was very efficient at assuring us that the light that blinked on and off as he was powering for take off at the Istanbul airport would be fixed as we taxied to a side runway to wait for a mechanic and word from "Atlanta" as to what needed to be repaired.

No one was that concerned when he acknowledged several hours later that the temperature was rising and that the overhead air jets needed to be opened to cool the cabin down. And, undoubtedly, we were all a little bit tired, and many had taken their sleeping draughts, when he announced that we were landing at London's Gatwick Airport to take on more fuel. The news that we would be put up at the Hilton connected to the airport was accepted as well.

But when we had to stand in line for three hours to be rechecked onto the flight and some of us were still not processed when the flight was late by more than an hour the next morning, people started to get annoyed.

"This is London," they said, "not some small airport in the middle of nowhere."

Hand-written letters and petitions were passed through the line. People, assured that they had connections to other places, were told that they would probably be spending the night in New York City. And when one woman learned that we were boarding the same plane and it had been fixed with parts arriving from Atlanta, she was sure that the airline was making a decision to send a broken plane into the air to cross the Atlantic.

We were the last of the passengers that were in a holding room, waiting for a bus to be found to take us to the plane as it sat some ways from the gates, when she told us we were being sent to a watery death.

"You know they make decisions about what is the least expensive," she said.

I couldn't quite get the logic about how the loss of a plane and its 300 passengers would be cost effective and gently reminded those around me that when I take my car to the mechanic and he tells me that it's fixed, I believe that it is safe.

On the bus, I countered the woman's story to those newly on the plane that there was never really the fear that the plane would crash, that there had been a plan to fly over land so that we were never out of an one hour reach of a place to land, and that the reason we had landed in London, and that the flight had been canceled, is that airplane personnel are not allowed to be on duty for more than 10 hours.

Later, as we made our way across the ocean in a seemingly perfectly working aircraft, the woman was visibly relaxed and laughing in the aisles. She might have acknowledged to herself that the story that she was telling us all was simply a product of her fear and her desire to go home, I don't know.

What I do know is that the pilgrimage did not end when we boarded the plane in Istanbul. My West Coast classmates are travelling still, as there were no connecting flights available last night due to heavy holiday travel.

As I digest all that I have experienced these past two weeks, and experience the reemgergence into my life, I am thinking that I would like to remain on pilgrimage, being open to whatever comes my way for whatever reason it comes.