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At 3pm EDT on July 27, 2007, we began the journey that had been building for the past two years. As the doors slid apart, we stepped through the gates of hell that lead to Logan International Airport. I was no stranger to Logan, having spent 12 hours at Logan previously, but even that paled in comparison to what was to come.
To start our journey, we were split into two groups. Those only staying for the first two weeks were on an Air Lingus flight to Glasgow with a connection in Ireland. Like the previous year's group that traveled to Basel by flying from Boston to Zurich with a connection at Heathrow, this group would arrive more or less on time. Perhaps it is not wise to attempt to fly directly into your final destination...
The other group was headed in the wrong direction from the start - Boston to Newark, then direct to Edinburgh. Things only got more wrong from there; flights were already delayed by the time we set foot inside the airport in the first of the fifteen hours we would eventually spend there. Attempts to get on an earlier flight (which was still scheduled to be earlier even with the delays at that point) initially met with resistance. One of the downsides of traveling in a group is that they tend to want to keep everyone together, making changes difficult. Once we convinced them that there was no need to wait for everyone to arrive, we received our boarding passes and had a quick trip through security.
The terminal, if it can even be called that, consisted of three gates, a news stand, a food kiosk (if it could even be called food), and a bathroom. We packed into an already crowded gate, only finding out after the excess people had departed and the air conditioning began to win its eternally losing battle to control the climate that our gate had been changed. We dutifully packed into that gate area as well.
We were scheduled for a 5:45pm departure and, right on schedule (something that would not be said for another 12 hours), we boarded at 5:15pm. Then we waited. And waited. And then they allowed people to leave the plane. And then they made everyone leave the plane. Shortly after 6pm, when we should have been in the air, we were back in the aspiring terminal stuck in a holding pattern.
The reason for the delay was a thunderstorm that was expected to probably be somewhere that might be in our flight path by the time we got to it, if we ever took off. All westbound traffic had the same problem, and soon all flights out of Newark would be similarly afflicted. It was no longer a matter of when we would leave, but if.
At this point in our journey, we were still in high spirits. Sure there was a delay, but there was nothing we could do about it and nothing we needed to do; we would leave when we could, and our connecting flight would probably still be there waiting for us, if it had even arrived by then. Food was a bit of a concern, as the kiosk offered the finest snacks and premade sandwich-like substances that could be found sitting in a refrigerated case from day to day, with no indication of when they were placed there or if they had ever traveled farther than we had gone since our arrival. There's something comical about sandwiches eternally bound to a confined space being eaten by people also seemingly bound to that same confined space. I might know what it is if my spirits were still as high as they were then.
With food pretty much out of the equation, we still had entertainment. I had started to watch an episode of Doctor Who on the plane, but I hadn't even gotten halfway through when we were evicted from the plane. Without my laptop power adapter and with no available electrical outlets in sight (no to mention no idea of when we would ever leave), I decided to seek less power-hungry methods of keeping myself distracted from my current situation. One of these methods was a book. As you might have guessed, the book was by Kurt Vonnegut. I apologize for its influence on this narrative; sleep deprivation and Vonnegut do not mix. The book itself is unimportant; its themes of global starvation and the last remnants of humanity stranded on a hellish island only mildly relevant to our situation.
At 8:30pm we received a scheduled update telling us that there was no update. Around 9pm, we were informed that the plane that was to take us from Newark to Edinburgh had been diverted to Buffalo because of the weather, delaying it long enough for us to still make our connection. We boarded soon after that and left the gate. That excursion would be as far as we would get that night. First we were delayed for 30 minutes, then we were informed that our pilot, due to FAA regulations regarding pilot working hours, would be out of time to take off well before we were expected to be informed of when we could be expected to find out when someone would know more about when we could take off. By 11pm the flight was long since canceled and we were waiting at baggage claim. By 11:30, we were set loose with nothing but our luggage and the promise of a 6:30am flight to Newark, with a 7:55pm connection to Edinburgh.
The matter of what to do do next was a problem. The least expensive hotel with shuttle service was $139 per night, of which we only needed less than 5 hours. Transportation home would be at least that much, with a significant amount of time spent in transit. In the end, we claimed a spot by the departures/arrivals board and settled in for the night.
From 3:00am to 3:05am, I enjoyed a state that was much like sleep. For the rest of the night, I was not so lucky. I started off with reading, solitaire, and more Doctor Who episodes, but by 3:30 I was reduced to trying to find a position that wasn't too awkward or painful. By 4am I gave up.
4am was also incidentally when the airline counters opened. The line at Continental was already all the way back to security, an odd inversion of the usual security line. It took over half an hour to get through the line, but when we finally did, they didn't know what to do with us because our tickets had been voided. It took another half hour to get our boarding passes issued, by which time the rest of the group had arrived and was in the process of dealing with the voids.
Despite a long line at security, things went smoothly the rest of the way, finally getting us to Newark only 12 hours after our scheduled arrival (and 12 hours before our next scheduled departure). The group scattered from there, some heading out to New York City, others finding a nice secluded section of floor to crash on. Many found food among the plentiful supply of restaurants. Everyone regrouped by 7:15pm, just before our flight to Edinburgh began boarding.
I should say at this point that there are many things I find more pleasurable than a transatlantic flight, trips to the DMV/RMV and several kinds of dental work among them. The screaming child was removed from the flight prior to departure, making the ordeal slightly less unpleasant. The flight ended in Edinburgh shortly after 8am, completing our 36 hour journey and delivering us straight into another adventure without even enough time to get cleaned up from the last one...