flat on my face

Eventually our disgruntled group stranded in O'Hare's airport lounge accepted its fate and we prepared ourselves for the long night ahead.  I found a bar and paid a king’s ransom for a beer in a paper cup, a sandwich and a large iced donut.  An official took pity on us and raided a plane parked outside for the night, kindly distributing blankets and pillows amongst us.  I struggled to get comfortable curled up on hard seats with inconvenient arms.  In the hollow silence of the almost deserted airport some clown started playing a wailing trumpet, echoing the mood of our small marooned group as we prepared for a long sleepless night.  Sleepless in Chicago.  A few cheery souls began singing.  Outside the rain kept pelting down streaking against the glass walls of the airport.  As I tried to get some sleep, I imagined I was Columbus bravely sailing across a vast ocean to a New World, full of anticipation.  Certainly we had cro...

The old caravan parked by the roadside beneath the tall eucalypts in the Australian bush, my home (such as it was) until only yesterday, seemed a lifetime away.  (How I came to be living in a leaky old caravan is explained in Chapter 2.) As we gently cruised at around 30,000 feet, I became alarmed as I watched the endless expanse of white fluffy cloud below lightly brushed by the late afternoon sun give way to a dark menacing tentacle of trouble reaching high above us in the distance. The plane dramatically changed course and began losing altitude. Just then a voice from the cockpit broke the silence:  “We’ve just been informed by the control tower at Chicago Airport that a severe electrical storm has knocked out one of the two runways there. We are one of about a hundred aircraft in the air maintaining a holding position waiting for a clearance to land. There are currently four holding positions over nearby alternative airfields in case landings are not possible a...