THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

Hola! I arrived back in Cambridge from Granada, Spain last night - and what a voyage back it turned out to be. I'll tell you all about Granada itself later; the journey home warrants its own blog entry.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we? I was up pretty early yesterday morning (6:30am Spanish time, 5:30am English time) in order to book a spot to visit La Alhambra, a moorish palace poised over the city at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. After standing in line for two hours, I finally got into the palace (it was worth the wait). I spent several hours wandering around the grounds before giving into tired feet and hunger, met Ray and Kendal for lunch, and then continued on one final jaunt around the city before packing for home. Sounds pretty standard, but this is where things started to get interesting.

I got myself packed and caught the bus to Granada airport - no mean feat considering the concierge at our hotel didn't speak much english and it took some pretty major convincing on my part to get him to realize that he did indeed have a bus schedule - arrived on time, got checked in and figured all was well. I know I shouldn't have made this assumption, given my luck with travelling (see one of my very first blog entries in September 2004 for an account of another misadventure), but I was scheduled for a short, direct flight from Granada to Stansted (about 30 minutes south of Cambridge). Easy, right?

Our flight boards as usual, I snooze a bit, and before I know it we're landing at Stansted. Except - as we taxied in towards the airport, I see the destination sign and it says "Birmingham". Hmmm. The plane parks out in the middle of the tarmac, far from the building, cuts the engines and then the pilot's voice comes over the speaker system. He's very sorry; apparently dense fog and non-functioning runway lighting at Stansted has made it necessary to divert to Birmingham. This is no small problem, as Birmingham is two hours north of Stansted - and now it is late at night, so there are no buses or trains to take people where they need to go.

As you can imagine, things only went downhill from there. It took them forever to offload the plane, because they had to call in airport staff and immigration officials to handle all the planes that were being diverted. No one from the airline was available to answer questions or offer assistance in getting people to the promised destination. There were only four rental cars available (for ten planes, each carrying 150+ passengers) and taxis had smelled fresh blood and were charging £250 to take people to Stansted.

I had just got myself used to the idea of spending the night at the airport - with a bunch of crazy people who were starting to get REALLY upset, necessitating the arrival of police in riot gear - when the people I'd been sitting next to on the plane offered to try to work out a solution together. They and another extremely kind couple managed to rent the very last car and absolutely refused to leave me behind. They bundled me and my luggage off with them, and dropped me on my doorstep at 3:30 this morning. The whole process was rather surreal and still feels like a dream to me - except that I luckily awoke to find myself home, just like Dorothy - and you have to admit that us renting the very last car speaks poorly-written movie plot. But it was my movie plot!

While it sucked the big one to find myself stranded in Birmingham in the wee hours of the morning (hello, Armpit of Britain), my evening was saved by the kindness of four strangers - people who noted my look of despair ("I have to be at work in six hours!!") and really went out of their way to help out. It's situations like this that reaffirm my belief that humans really are kind and wonderful beings.

More kindness directed towards me in the last week: the birthday messages that have continued to come in (thank-you!), Claire taking good care of me at work today when I was obviously a tired wreck, Claire's mom Gillian tailoring my ballgown for me, and the unending thoughtfulness of Tim and Cassandra. They drove all the way to Stansted to pick me up last night, and then, upon learning that I was in Birmingham, offered to come up there to get me if I needed it. Tim also made sure I got to work on time this morning (impressive, considering I only had 3 hours of sleep last night) and will be escorting me to Heathrow to pick up Joan and Alan, who arrive tomorrow afternoon. They beat Ray to Cambridge by about 10 hours.

All in all, things worked out rather well although I'm glad that I won't be flying again in the near future. The only catch is that Ray is still in Spain for another day, finishing up at his conference. He is flying home on the same airline, to the same airport, that gave me such trouble. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that it's not foggy on Wednesday night...