Trip Home for Jim, Ken and Don

The trip home for the three musketeers, like the trip in, was interesting. They left the compound before daylight Tuesday and arrived home late on Friday. Jim kindly wrote about the trip for today’s blog. As you read it you could get the idea they just might be missing our kids a tad. Perhaps??

We left the compound about 4:30 am and picked up Luckner then went on to Pont Sonde to pick up Daniel (our policeman) and drove to PaP. We needed to be at the airport for 0830 but left early to have a brief tour of PaP. We got to PaP about 0645 and drove through some of the badly collapsed areas. Now more than a month after the quake and many buildings still show no signs of anyone starting to clean up the rubble and collect the many thousands of bodies that must still be in there. We saw collapsed hotels, churches and government buildings, a nursing training college that was completely flat. The devastation is not possible for me to convey with words and pictures. It is just too vast to imagine unless you see it with your own eyes.

We then headed for the airport and along the way got a nice surprise as Luckner’s daughter Baby was waiting for us to say goodbye. She had spent the previous few days with her mother. There was great joy from all at seeing her there. We all took turns giving and receiving hugs and pictures and rejoicing with our new sister.

They then dropped us at the airport that they had picked up Dickie and Carol at when they flew in via MFI, but instead of just dropping us and running Karen decided to make sure of where we needed to be while we were going through security screening. It’s a good thing she did as they had moved MFI to the main terminal so we grabbed our bags and headed back to the truck. We went over to the main terminal, grabbed another round of hugs and handshakes but this time our crew (Luckner, Karen, Baby and Daniel) left us to go on our own. It was about 0800 when we got through security and found our way to where we would check in with MFI. We were first in line and I thought that would be the end of our delays.

Missing the kids already. The MAF crew (who do the bookings for MFI) showed up about 0815 and told us all to find a seat somewhere and they would get to us shortly. Because of the damage to the airport we weren’t inside but sitting outside facing the runways. We had shade from the terminal and a nice breeze so it was pretty comfortable. They started to call people in order of booking so I started to get a little nervous as by now there must have been 50 people sitting there for 19 seats. However soon I heard them call Sandra MacDonald so I had to get Ken and Don’s attention as they weren’t paying any (they both live in their own little worlds) and get them to the front where they took our passports which we later found out meant we were on the plane. A little while later they called everyone back up one at a time where they weighed us and all of our luggage. The number of passengers they take depends as much on weight as it does on number of people. After a few hours of sitting by the runway we were getting a bit peckish so Ken went rummaging through his pack for some snacks and came out with a bag of rocks which he kindly released back into the wild.

We had been told by someone that there was 2 flights that day 11:00 and 16:00 and weren’t sure which one we would get on. As the day dragged on and on and on and 1100 came and went one of our fellow passengers told us that the flight left Florida at 1100 and wouldn’t be to PaP before 1330. As the day passed we watched many planes and troops from different countries pass by us and all in all the day went fairly quickly. The fellow in charge of booking the flight started calling us in order to line up as they had a plane on the ground. None of us had seen it yet but I guess it had landed at the other part of the airport and refueled and was taxiing over to where we were waiting. Still missing the kids.

We flew in a Douglas DC3 that was built in 1944. While we were sitting in the plane on the runway in PaP, looking like I had just stepped out of the shower with all my clothes on, the pilot came out and apologized
that the heater was broken but there was lots of blankets if we were cold. I thought he was quite funny but by the time we were on the second leg of the flight I was looking for the blankets. We had stopped in the
Bahamas for fuel at a small airport (Exuma I think) on one of the many islands. After about 20 minutes we were back on the plane headed for Fort Pierce airport. A trip that could have been made with a flying time
of about 90 minutes in a modern jet had taken us about 6 hours on the DC3. The MFI staff were great to deal with and they even gave us a ride from the airport to our motel. The next morning after a hearty breakfast we hired a car to drive us from Ft Pierce to Ft Lauderdale for another night in a motel before our early flights home the next morning. The rest of the trip was uneventful as all went smoothly and I made it back to Lytton about 2pm yesterday.