FLYING HOME
All night in the Hampton Inn in Leon I lay in bed unable to sleep, or rather not sure when I was asleep and when I was awake, as the time slowly passed.
Then we were up at 3 a.m., quickly stuffed everything in our bags, had an apple and a sweet roll and a cup of coffee in the lobby of the Hampton Inn, got in the shuttle to the airport, quickly went through security and waited for our flight, dozed some of the hour and a half flight to Dallas/Fort Worth where we had a four hour wait where I then had the one adventure of the day.
I had pulled out an extra bag and filled it with stuff needed on the flight, so I was loaded down with three bags instead of two and the last one off the plane when an excited guy with a wheel chair insisted I sit down, which I did, bags hooked to the wheel chair and off we went. I didn’t see the rest of the group for an hour and had no idea where we were or where we were going. There were about four very excited wheelchair pushers pushing slumping passengers, who were shouting back in forth in an incomprehensible language, which I learned when I asked, was Arabic with a mixture of Hindi, which they were astonished to find that I could speak. We went from elevator to elevator with excited commands back and forth in Arabic, all of us riders, elderly and apparently infirm, not knowing what was going on. When we got to customs with its immense line for foreigners, we were pushed to the front into a wheelchair line. I was behind a Spanish speaking family whom the American customs agent barked at with loud commands, lining them up as if they were idiots, which they dutifully tried to obey, aware of his power. He was polite to me and off we went again with more excited shouting in Arabic. Security was the same way, my things were snatched away and put into trays, I was sent through the shoes on old man’s gate without even being xrayed, put back in my chair and then finally put on one of those beeping carts with shouts at pedestrians to get out of the way by a Ugandan this time, who said he had been in the United States 11 years and barely remembered his country. At that point I realized that these helpful, friendly excited guys were probably the very rapists and murderers that Trump was so eager to deport.
I was dropped at the gate for my flight to Asheville before the rest of my group got there. The rest of trip, the flight from Dallas to Asheville, was uneventful and soon I was home and my month long adventure was over.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 