The following is a guest post by my wonderful mom, Lois. It’s the story of the rest of the family flying to Rome to meet me (and later the rest of the group). It’s part of an upcoming photobook/travelogue/diary that I’m putting together about the Europe tour of 2008. The written portions are authored by the tour members.
On Friday evening when confirming our Wichita-Chicago flight for Saturday morning, Marvin discovered it had been canceled. We’d been put on a much later flight with which we could not make our Chicago-Munich flight. After some creative and hard work with the airline, he finally got them the allow us to drive 4 hrs. to Kansas City to make the 6 AM flight. We quickly scrambled around to finish packing, loaded up and at 2 AM drove 4 hours through rain, thunder and lightening to my sister Carol’s house in Kansas City. Her husband, Roberto kindly took us to the airport then parked our vehicle at their house for 3 weeks. The Lord really protected us on that drive up there as we learned that there were tornadoes in the area that night.
From KC to Chicago to Munich our flights were uneventful, the way we like it. Our family did a lot of sleeping. Heidi had gluten free meals. We landed in Germany on a gorgeous summer morning as the sun was rising over the red rooftops and green fields. Soon we took off from Munich to fly to Rome and to Hans. We’d only been flying 20-30 minutes over the beautiful Austrian-Italian alps when suddenly there were two LOUD bangs outside the plane. One of the four engines was shooting smoke and sparks. The Captain immediately shut down that engine. After a bit, the Captain or somebody in the cockpit gave a long announcement in German followed by an almost unintelligible translation into English. The idea was that we were returning to Munich. Everybody was tense including the flight attendants. I got out my Bible and was reading and praying. Marvin was sitting up front with Dietrich and the rest of us were scattered throughout the plane. Due to our type of tickets we couldn’t always sit together. There was a Taiwanese couple beside me who couldn’t understand my English and I couldn’t “quite” make out their Chinese so I just motioned that I was praying and they nodded appreciatively. I decided that if we make it down safely, we WILL take the train to Rome. We were greeted with the rescue vehicles as we touched down safely! The passengers cheered!
Even though we made it down safely, we didn’t take the train. Marvin earnestly explained to me that would take about 12 hrs. instead of the less than 2 hours with flying and also reminded me that Hans was there in Rome waiting for us. With his persuasive powers and with a lot of encouragement from the children, we boarded another Lufthansa flight. I did notice this plane looked a lot newer and as we boarded, I asked the attendant if he’s sure this one is okay. He assured me this plane was just fresh out of maintenance.
Were we ever thankful to the Lord when we finally made it to Rome and there was Hans to greet us!! I was also quite thankful the Tour Members didn’t have to go through the troubles we had.
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