Home Again

Or should i say, "Home FINALLY!". After a scheduled departure from San Francisco at 10:52pm, Wednesday 25th Oct, my plane was 2.5 hrs in flight, over the Pacific Ocean when the pilot interrupts and says "Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately we are having mechancial difficulties and we will need to turn around and go back to San Francisco. If you are sitting by a window and you see liquid flying out of the aircraft, it is because we need to jettison 150 000 pounds of fuel, because we cannot land with the weight we are at." Great! So after we return, customer service staff inform us that the our next flight will be at 11pm the next day! There were quite a few mad passengers, some guy was even screaming a very long "Arrrrrrgggggh!!" Funny. Even funnier, the film we had just finished watching before hearing that announcement was 'Poseidon'- a film about a ship sinking into the ocean.

So folks, make sure you don't fly United, because what followed was sure to prove a very unprofessional service. They gave us $60 limit to find ourselves a hotel room (in SAN FRANCISCO), $10 for breakfast and $10 for lunch, and a $50 for a round trip taxi ride. There was an Oracle convention on downtown so apparently they couldn't find us any accomodation, which was untrue as many people did find accomodation. Lucky for me, I had Stephanie living 20 mins away from the airport, who was luckily quite cheery at 3am in the morning!

The next day we were all set to fly to Sydney. Sitting in our seats and waitng for take-off, we were already on the tarmac. All of a sudden the pilot says on the speaker "Unfortunately ladies and gentlemen, we cannot leave at this time as we have further difficulties and we will be returning to arrivals and changing aircrafts." Sheesh! We changed aircrafts, and like a horror movie all these babies started crying and screaming hysterically as we were taking off.

So the plane didn't crash and I am alive! On the approach to Sydney, the pilot says to us "Ladies and gentlemen, Sydney has reported strong winds and as a result have closed one landing strip. Unfortunately, it will take us another hour to land." After so many frustrated and angry passengers, the pilot made it known to us that he lied to get us down sooner, saying that he told Sydney that we only had 45mins left of fuel, when we had 1.5 hrs left. We arrived in Sydney at 9:09am.

So that was an interesting trip home. I slept for 8 hours straight (I highly recommend ear plugs, neck pillow and blindfold) so my flight was only 6 hours. It was good to see my family again, and soon after arriving in Sydney i was here doing this, with these two: