The Gods Driven Crazy
The Gods obviously had it in for me and meetings were summoned somewhere on Olympus, where the following ensued:
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Have just heard that she is planning to go photographing in the rain forests of Costa Rica.
We cannot allow that!! This must be stopped
A nice little attack of E. Coli should settle that idea and might also solve the problems we have with this individual permanently?
Drat: although she was one of 70 people who were hospitalised during this E. Coli outbreak, and was in the ICU for five days, she has managed to survive (although others did not).
At least, she is so weakened by the experience (she needs a walking frame to even stand-up!) there is no way that she can go to Costa Rica in just four-weeks time.
Problem: she has discovered a Treadmill in her daughter’s house and she is on that damned machine three times a day. She says that she has fully recovered and definitely intends to go on the trip
A heavy snow-storm the day before her flight should put the kibosh on this whole stupid notion.
Success: her JetBlue flight has been cancelled by the airline just a few hours before departure.
She has apparently telephoned every airline that operates from any airport within 100 miles and found the last remaining seat on any aircraft which is flying in the general direction of San Jose.
Twelve hours after her original flight, and a long taxi-ride to Newark, New Jersey, has finally got her on to a red-eye United Airlines flight to Panama.
Newark delayed the plane on the runway for an hour but unfortunately it is now airborne.
How do we stop this?
Guess we could give the passenger (who is sitting four rows in front of her) a heart attack?!
Much scrambling by the flight-crew and a couple of passengers with medical training; some extensive use of Oxygen cylinders; but the flight has to be aborted and it lands at Charlotte, North Carolina where an ambulance is already on the tarmac awaiting the sick passenger.
So the plane will drop off that passenger and immediately take-off again?
Absolutely not!
Everybody has to de-plane because the Oxygen cylinders have been used and the flight cannot continue until they have been replaced.
It’s the middle of the night so getting new cylinders from a warehouse is a problem.
Three hours pass. United Airlines provides free candies and bottles of water!
Oh good: one of the flight crew has now exceeded her allowable working hours and must be replaced.
Finally, everyone re-boards the plane but it sits on the runway for a further hour before some-one eventually wakes-up in the Control Tower and gives the flight permission to take-off.
Very late arrival in Panama City means that she has missed her connection to San Jose, Costa Rica!
Several more hours pass before a replacement flight becomes available so she finally does arrive in Costa Rica — but 24 hours later than originally planned so she has missed the start of her trip and the car which would have driven her to the Lodge.
Foiled again!
She has found a taxi who has agreed to drive her the five hours north to the Lodge in the forests on the Nicaraguan border — the last couple of hours over dirt roads.
One last possible trick: United Airlines have lost both of her suitcases!
That will surely fix her?
She has no tripod, monopod or Wimberley on which to mount that ridiculously heavy D5 of hers and that very expensive 500 mm FL E lens which she has rented;
no personal pharmaceuticals (including bug repellent!) or cosmetics;
and no change of clothes from the thick winter sweaters in which she has travelled from snow-bound New York to the Tropics.
Unfortunately, she has apparently managed to get all her lenses and cameras into her Carry-on luggage.
Well she did reach Costa Rica in spite of every possible thing which we Gods could do.
Her stubborn persistence has confounded our every effort and has been more than enough to drive us completely crazy so perhaps we should finally relent and allow those missing suitcases to be found and delivered to her at the Lodge two days later?
