Taiwan Journal #1 - This is Not Going According to Plan

(hi everyone, this is Greg writing...)

The fact that I have internet access right now when I should be on a plane should let you know that things aren't going exactly according to plan right now. Here's what's up...

We drove to Nashville last night so we could catch our early morning flight to Dallas. We only had a 40 minute layover in Dallas so we knew it would be tight... 40 minutes to catch a flight to Tokyo had us pretty nervous. Our flight this morning took off from Nashville on time and everything was going just fine until...

"This is your captain speaking... there are some sudden thunderstorms that have come up over Dallas and we're going to have to divert... we'll fly around the storms to Waco and fly in behind the storms... shouldn't be too much of a problem".

Okay, so maybe a lot of flights are experiencing this and they'll just delay the flight to Tokyo to wait for us. We might have to run through the airport but hey, that will be exciting. We'll be fine.

"This is your captain, guess what everybody? I'll be darned but we're fresh out of jet fuel if you can believe it. Tell ya what, we'll just land here on this airstrip 5 minutes from the real airport and refuel and we'll have you there in a jiffy, okay? Great. Thanks for your patience."

Awesome... anyway, long story short, we get to Dallas about 45 minutes after our plane to Tokyo took off. Wanna guess how many flights there are from Dallas to Tokyo each day? If you guessed one, you win the other half of the room service pizza sitting at the foot of my bed in the Courtyard Mariott right now.

So we're stuck for 24 hours here in Dallas in an area that could only be described as a barren wasteland of abandoned factories, warehouses, vacant lots, railroad yards, and as luck would have it, a Courtyard Mariott. We're surrounded by what looks like the set to an episode of "24". I'm pretty sure I just heard Jack Bauer scream "We're running out of time!" from behind one of the factories that completely surround this hotel.

The ONLY piece of good news from the day is that American Airlines agreed to let us stay an extra day in Taiwan since we lost a full 24 hours getting there. So, instead of getting home at around 11:00 pm next Sunday, we'll now be returning home at around 6:00 next Monday. We'll be flying back through Tokyo and Los Angeles instead of Dallas which is fine with me... I don't care if I ever come to Dallas again.