Wait, wait! I’ve got the order of things all messed up. I need to tell you a story about our flight into DC.
No matter the order of things. You know we’re back home know, so this is not real-time, anyway. So don’t worry about the chronological order of all this. Let’s just do a bit of a rewind.
We flew Southwest (of course) to DC via—get this—Denver. Austin to DC via Denver, Colorado. On the second leg of our journey, we sat toward the back. And as we were getting settled into our seats, we looked up to see a hoard of middle school students pouring down toward the back of the plane. Of course, Trudy said. It was spring. And this was their eighth grade Washington, DC trip.
“Wait, I want to sit with you.”
“Let me sit there. Let me sit there.”
“Don’t you want to sit with me?”
“What’s wrong with that seat.”
“I have to sit all alone?”
You get the picture.
So anyway…
As we were crossing the midwest, we flew over and thru one of the many bands of storms that have been stretching southwest-to-northeast across the midsection of the country this spring. We flew into storm clouds, and I looked over at Trudy and said, “It’s going to get bumpy.”
At that point the pilot came on and had everyone sit down and fasten their seat belts. And sure enough it got bumpy, not shockingly so, but enough to startle anyone who might not have flown before. And you see, we were sitting in a plane full of 8th graders most of whom had clearly not flown before.
With each bump, the kids all yelled and squealed and exclaimed. When the plane went up, they yelled. When the plane went down, the shrieked. And this went on for some time as we made a long descent into Dulles Airport.
30 kids all yelling, “Woaaaaaaaah!”
30 kids all shrieking, “Aaaaaaaaah!”
For the most part, they were pretty good about it. Some of them even began to hold their hands up in the air as on a roller coaster. But some were having a harder time: a girl behind us was quietly sobbing as we landed, and someone in front of us got sick. I suspect none of them realized what a challenge the pilot had as she tried to bring the 737 down smoothly onto the runway: the plane hovered a long time as it flew down the runway, rolling majorly from left to right and then right to left. And then she put it down as if there wasn’t the slightest puff of breeze.
As we pulled up to the gate, all the kids stood up and crowded the aisle. We sat back and waited for them all to get off. And then we got off.
And that was the beginning of our little vacation in DC.