P.S. from home

This is Saturday. We were to have arrived yesterday, but much as we had expected, we got caught in the confusion of the TAP (Portugal's national airline) pilots strike, which was Thursday and Friday. I had seen notices of the strike on the Internet, and although the union said they would guarantee flights to the islands, the pilots didn't show up for our flight. We arrived in Lisbon at 8 AM, after flying from Dallas, via Philadelphia, overnight. Our 2 PM flight was canceled just 30 minutes before flight time, then I spent 2 hours in a line to see what the airline was going to do (they promised to take us to a hotel and fly us home today), then spent another 2 hours waiting for them to take us to the hotel. Got to the hotel just after 5 PM, and it took over 2 hours to check in because there were bus loads of other stranded travelers (most of whom French) who had arrived at the hotel just before us. We made several friends while standing in the lines at the airport and hotel...haven't spoken that much French since my last year of French in about 1980. We got into our hotel room just before 8 PM... almost 12 hours from the time we had landed... 24 hours from the time we took off from Dallas ... 30 hours since we had last slept. (Discounting the two very short catnaps on the flight over.)

Although other passengers were being offered seats on the first flights today, I told the lady we'd rather not have to get up at 6 AM; book us on a later flight. And she did. We slept in, had a leisurely breakfast, took our time getting to the airport, and caught the 2 PM flight...24 hours later than our original schedule.

It's good to be home.

P.S. Only 1 of our 3 pieces of checked baggage arrived here when we did. We were told that one of the missing pieces would be on the last flight from Lisbon tonight about midnight. The other? Who knows?