The Adventure Begins...

Well, it turns out I have a little time this morning to let you know how things are going... or, rather, not going...

First, we started out the evening by turning in our linen and receiving a "shelf stable meal" to eat--a little something to hold us over until we got on the bus at midnight for the 45 minute trip to the airport. I had never heard of, let alone seen, a shelf-stable meal... but it looks like this:



The chips were good.


Here's the exciting part. We had five busloads of people and 4 stake-bed trucks filled with the bags of 5 busloads worth of people. The plan is to pull up directly to the aircraft (A310), load the gear, load the people, and off we go...

Unfortunately one of the drivers got a little close with a truck full of bags and got the truck wedged under the plane... yes, that's right! Our baggage truck got wedged under the body and wing of our plane--they cannot get it unstuck! (This is live blogging--too bad most people that might reasonably read this are asleep right now.) I imagine they will get the two vehicles unstuck soon (let the air out of the tires and move the truck that way), but then we have to wait for an inspector to come check out the plane and approve it for flying--a good idea since their are 300 of us, no parachutes, and we will be going over the North Atlantic...

I couldn't get close enough for a great picture, and it is quite dark, but you can make out the truck under the back of the plane (from this angle):



I'll let you know what happened...