Escape from LA

After one week with two trips totaling 4 1/2 nights in Los Angeles I had found a local yarn shop, learned to use public transit and was even recoginzed at the Catholic church where I attend mass on Sunday layovers here.

As much as I LOVE not having to repack every morning, three days of watching hurricane Ike trash Texas, no word from my company and running into more and more stranded crew members around the hotel I started to feel a little bit like I had gone missing in action.

I tried to get on the phone with crew coordinations, but was literaly on hold for hours. A LOT of our flights go through Houston (it's our main base), so they certainly had their hand full. I felt a little bad calling because I know they were swamped, but I also didn't want the hotel to kick me out because they didn't get their fax.

After one final visit to the Viva Fresh burrito place, I logged on to my schedule and saw that scheduling had come up with a clever plan to bust me out of California.

At 11pm Sunday, under cover of night, I stepped into a black towncar with and was whisked onto the freeway.

We drove an hour east of the city to the small Ontario Airport where I met up with a Houston crew that had been stranded there for three days (let me just say I lucked out on places to go MIA). We worked a short red-eye to Houston, arriving about 5:30am and we were one of the first planes cleared to land that since the airport reopened that morning.

I was pretty tired by that point, and the lead flight attendant drove me crazy because she was so chatty. It was 4am and she would not shut up. There were hardly any passengers, and they were fast asleep anyway, so all I wanted to do was hide in the galley, but she kept talking about every topic that floated into her brain.

As we were preparing to land, she pulled out her totebag to stow something and happened to show me that it was full of food. She laughed a little nervously and said that her family had been stuck at the house for 4 days without power because of the storm and they needed some provisions. She looked out the little jumpseat window and urged me to do the same. I'd never seen it look so dark there. She sighed again and said, "OK, let's land and I'll get back to reality".

Reality was, I felt like a colossal jerk for getting grouchy with her.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be miles away from home and not knowing what you'll find when you get there.

Our section of the airport looked OK, but there was a lot of damage to other terminals, the interterminal shuttle train, and all of the roads that lead to the airport.

I was supposed to deadhead right away to Newark, but that flight was cancelled, so I went down to the crewroom. Once again it was impossible to get a scheduler on the phone, so I just put in my earplugs and passed out in the "quiet" room for a few hours.

It was a restless rest, so eventually I just got up and listened to the other flight attendants tell their storm stories. It was very crowded, but the place had an emergency shelter comradarie (and dank smell because of flooding) and everyone was in fairly good spirits, considering.

I was finally deadheaded out at 5:30pm. It was surreal to see a flight from Houston to Newark with only 50 people (about a third of them deadheading crewmembers). As further proof that things were crazy, I was upgraded to first class. The movie was something starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz, and, craziest of all, I actually enjoyed it.

LA must have gotten to my brain.