CHILE -- Part 1. (part 2 above)
Wow, I've been so busy lately! Here's a story about my trip with 60 Burke Mountain Academy alpiners to Chile! The trip to Santiago was one to remember for sure! As you can imagine, 60 people traveling with extra bags which were ALL overweight (not to mention gates, tuning benches, all that jazz) could cause a little bit of chaos while traveling. We all ended up boarding the plane in Boston without trouble though.. and all there was to do was wait for take off. So we waited, and we waited. Then over the intercom the pilot told us that there were very sorry for the delay, but do to the extra weight of BAGS (meaning the Burkie bags) they needed 30 some volunteers to take the next flight to Dallas, which would depart a few hours later.
I think that all the Burkies sunk 3 inches lower into their seats as if to hide from the 30 angry people who were disembarking the plane. Then the pilot told us that they were balancing out the weight of the plane by taking some of the extra fuel out. OH BOY. So, finally, we were speeding down the runway with our stomachs dropping as we lifted into the air. 2 hours later, again over the intercom the pilot told us that do to dangerous landing conditions — you see we were flying in the middle of a thunder storm — we were going to be circling above the airport until the weather cleared up. That didn't happen, so we found ourselves flying to Austin to refuel because we were running low. Once again, thank you to the Burkies (including myself) who all were cursed with the trouble of having to bring extra, overweight bags. By this time it was common to hear grumbles of annoyance from the other flyers, in fact I was almost getting comfortable with them— NOT.
By then we had missed our flight from Dallas to Santiago, or so we thought. A few of us were getting updates on our phones every so often (thank you technology!) saying that the flight to Santiago was delayed, which made sense because if we couldn't land then they probably couldn't take off. But it we were getting close to bewitching hour.
.)) Mikaela Shiffrin
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