When we signed for this cruise it wasn't supposed to be an adventure cruise, but getting there sure was an adventure!

As we flew from San Jose to Dallas/Ft. Worth for the first leg of our journey it was a pleasant, uneventful flight on an American Airlines MD-90. We had gotten to the airport the suggested two hours before flight time which gave us a chance to sit and read and anticipate our voyage. Flying from west to east we caught up with the sunset over New Mexico and enjoyed the twinkling lights of the towns and farms that slipped by below us.

As we got into Texas the clouds started to build up and we were skirting a storm with pretty spectacular cloud-to-cloud lightning. We made good time, however and landed at DFW ahead of schedule. The pilot informed us that our gate was still occupied and that we would have to wait out on the tarmac for it to be free. This was a minor annoyance since this plane had a very noisy hydraulic pump that whined loudly as we sat there.

The original arrival time came and went, and still we were parked out on the airport. The captain relayed the message "No ground crews are available to move aircraft" and we wondered what that meant. He also gave permission for cell phones to be used so that passengers could contact people who were supposed to be meeting them. Information started to trickle in from the cell phone calls, as friends on the ground told us what the tower wouldn't.

Weather Delay

We learned that a funnel cloud had been spotted nearby so the whole area was under a tornado warning. The tower had been evacuated as a safety measure, and all of the people in the terminal were herded into the restrooms to keep them away from the vast expanses of glass that make up the DFW terminal buildings. The ground crews were not available for the simple reason that it was deemed too dangerous for them to go out on the tarmac where we sat. We had taken three hours to fly from San Jose to DFW, and now we had spent almost the same amount of time waiting in an aluminum tube with a loud hydraulic pump.

Then the hail started. It came rattling down on our roof, bouncing off the wings and piling up on the ground. We could only see it by the light of our wing-tip position light, but it was a very exciting five minutes as we listened to the drumming and watched the hailstones shattering on the light enclosure.

The next communication from the tower was that they could not move any planes until they had been inspected for hail damage. Oh yes: there was only one crew qualified to do that inspection. The night dragged on. We were told not to worry about our connecting flights since they had been delayed also.

Finally, after four hours of sitting in the inclement weather, nine hours after leaving home, we were instructed to return to our seats so that the plane could be moved. We didn't go into a gate, however, we just moved a little closer to the terminal building and turned around. The new plan was to use airport shuttle busses to take us to the terminal. We filed down the tail stairs built into this model of airplane, boarded the busses, were driven a couple of hundred feet to the terminal where we walked up some external stairs and into the building.

Making the connection

What greeted us as we entered was chaos. Four thousand other people had had their travel plans disrupted by the storm and were all trying to get going towards their next destination. We checked the monitors and headed over to the neighboring terminal to the gate listed for our nine o'clock flight to Santiago de Chile. It was now rescheduled for half past midnight. It still needed to be inspected for hail damage. We found another place to sit and read and contemplate our voyage.

Flight time rolled around and there was no activity to board the plane. Finally around one in the morning American Airlines released a few tidbits of information:

• Our flight would not go out until 9:30 the next morning.
• The hotel at the airport was full as were all of the hotels with which American had contracts.
• All of the folding cots that American had were already occupied.
• We could help ourselves to blankets and pillows from the dwindling stack in the concourse.

At this point we decided to telephone Holland-America for instructions, since it looked like we would miss the 5 PM sailing of the Ryndam. We noticed a lot of other purple Ryndam tags on the hand baggage of the people waiting for the Santiago flight. When I dialed the number in our travel documents, I got a recording: "You have reached the Holland-America air-sea office. Our normal business hours are between 7 AM and 6 PM Pacific time Monday through Friday, and 7 AM to 3PM Saturday and Sunday. Please call back when the office is open. <click>" For the first time we felt lost and stranded.

We decided that rather than trying to find a vacancy in an unfamiliar area and risk not being there if a further change to the schedule came up, we would spend the night at the airport. There was no place to lie down. All of the seats in the waiting room had large armrests on either side. People had dragged them out of the way to get some floor space to sleep on. We wandered down into the people-mover station for the "Traam" that took people around the airport. It had stopped running around 1 AM so it was empty and felt a little like the eye of a storm. There were a couple of armless benches covered in steel mesh which we dragged over to a darker corner, and tried to get a couple of hours of fitful sleep.

Our wake-up call came at six in the morning when the automated train started running again. A loud female voice yelled: "Stand back from the doors. The train is leaving." followed by two blasts of an air horn. This was repeated every two minutes, so we got up, stretched and scratched, and returned the benches to their original positions.

We got some breakfast after standing in the long line for McDonalds, the only thing open. We then checked the monitors to see what gate our flight would be leaving from. Santiago was not listed. It wasn't like so many other flights: simple cancelled, it was gone, vanished, erased. The gate from the previous night was now loading passengers for Milwaukee and knew nothing of Santiago. We had to go out to the ticketing counter for further information.

We joined the line of people trying to get going again, and when we finally reached the front we were told that we were going out on that nights nine o'clock flight, twenty-four hours after we were due to depart. Without any guidance from the cruise line, we took what was offered and got a couple of the last available seats on that flight. Many of our fellow cruise passengers (our "Boat People", as we started calling our selves) were being rerouted via Miami.

Catching the Ship

We decided to rent a car and drive around Dallas for the day. But since it was now almost nine AM Sunday morning, the Holland-America office should be opening soon. We finally talked to a live person and she informed us that we needed to fly to La Serena, Chile which was the nearest airport to the port of Coquimbo where the Ryndam would be when we arrived.

We got back into the now much longer line. It was moving slowly. The passengers at the ticket counter seemed somewhat agitated. I would not have wanted to be one of the ticket agents that morning! We were lucky when we finally got to the front of the line. Our agent was a very competent young man who knew enough to actually telephone LAN Chile and get us reserved seats on one of the two flights from Santiago to La Serena that day.

	We carried out our plan to rent a car and go visit some of the places we knew from over fifteen years ago when we lived in Dallas, met, and married. Our first stop was the Church of the Transfiguration, where we met up with old friends, and prayed for a safe journey.
	We had lunch at the Black-eyed Pea restaurant, a favorite of ours. Next stop was S.M.U. where Marie had been a librarian. We saw the changes to the library complex, and recalled found memories of our years in Dallas
	We drove along Turtle Creek. Spring had worked its magic on the fabulous Azalea bushes. Now it was time to return to the airport

Finally things started to work. We checked back in, boarded the plane, and started the long flight to the southern hemisphere. The flight was crowded, and sleeping would have been difficult had it not been for the fact that we had been underway for over 32 hours with only a few hours sleep.

Upon arrival in Santiago we were met by a representative of Holland-America who guided us over to the domestic departures section for the short hop to La Serena and the ship. That's where we discovered that most of our fellow boat people only had standby reservations on the flight. Four of us had actual seats. The others couldn't board the flight. The representative got on her cell phone and arranged for a couple of busses to take them up to the ship. It was a six and a half hour drive. We elected to fly.

Delay is normal on this trip. Our flight to La Serena wasn't boarding. Finally we understood that it was waiting for the fog to lift at our destination. Finally, with one hour of delay, we quickly boarded and took off. The area we were headed to was overcast and when the plane descended into the clouds to land, he was unable to see the airport, so we climbed back up and started to circle. We would wait up to twenty minutes for a better weather report. I understood the pilot to reassure us that we had enough fuel for forty minutes, so not to worry.

After about fifteen minutes he headed out to sea where the clouds ended, dropped down below the clouds and came in at a low altitude. We touched down and gave a cheer. We were almost there. Holland-America met us, loaded our luggage and whisked us away to the ship. Never has a cruise ship looked so good to us!