Day One - Part One

The car service was scheduled to arrive at 8:00 a.m. to take us to the airport in St. Louis, but arrived 45 minutes early. I was still getting dressed! We ended up leaving the house at 7:45 a.m. and thirty minutes later had arrived at Lambert International Airport. The airport was almost a ghost town, so checking in took only a few minutes and we were soon through security and felt like the trip had actually begun for real.

We had an expensive airport breakfast at Chili’s just down from our gate. Our flight to Philadelphia left on time (to the second!) and after a smooth flight we arrived twenty minutes early. Our inbound flight from St. Louis came in to gate F16. Our outbound flight to Budapest was scheduled to depart from gate A9 – completely opposite ends of the Philadelphia airport. So we took the shuttle from terminal to terminal and spent our four hour layover in the Philadelphia airport in the Admiral’s Club lounge consuming drinks and snacks.

We departed the gate on time and slowly made our way to the runway, but just as we were to take off the captain made an announcement that a compartment housing most of the plane’s electrical cables was overheating and they would have to run a test to determine the reason. After twenty minutes or so the announcement was made that we would have to go back to the terminal and have some mechanics check out the problem and they would either be able to fix it or they would decide the plane would not be approved for flying at the present time. (Meanwhile it was extremely warm inside the plane.) After quite a while it was FINALLY determined that the plane was approved for take off and so we made our way back out to the runway. Our departure ended up being almost three hours later than scheduled – 9:15 p.m. instead of 6:20 p.m.