India: Part 5 – Fate sucker punches us in the face

After a 24 hour sleep-a-thon (on and off), we wake up very early. About 3:30am I start to pack, when somebody stabs me in the lower back… at least that’s what it feels like and I drop to my knees. There goes the back. At the time, I was lifting a shirt. I guess that was the tipping point.

For the better half of the morning, I’m apologizing to my wife,  because she now has to pack everything while I lay in bed, with my legs propped up. Here I am trying every stretching exercise I can find on the Internet to help with the back pain. P1010037I barely make it through the shower, and then we’re off to the airport with me hobbling along.

On the way to the airport, the AC blows out in the cab, and starts pushing smoke into the cabin. The cab driver tries to turn it off before we notice. It’s too late, I noticed. I open my window, and he sheepishly smiles at me. We’re still heading to the airport. I guess that’s good.. but…

Problem is.. there’s two airports, and the taxi driver dropped us off at the International airport. We don’t realize this until they check P1010047our itinerary and tell us we can’t go in the airport. They tell us we need to be at the domestic airport. We then have to hop another cab to get the domestic airport because we’re going from Mumbai/Bombay to Delhi. The cab is tiny, so they throw one of our pieces of luggage on top, and the smaller ones in the trunk, which doesn’t close. Now we’re running to the other airport.

We get through security and sit in the airport glad that at this point it went well so far. And I mean well despite the fact that I’m walking around hunched over and walking like I’m 95 years old.

Glad that the mess is behind us, we go through boarding, and one of the security guards notices that one of Heather’s bags doesn’t have a stamp on the security tag they added. They added the tag that they looked at it, but didn’t give it the “official” seal. Now they tell us to run back through the airport, to security and get it rescanned. That is exactly what we do. We run (I scoot) to security, get the one bag x-rayed once more, then we run back to boarding (I’m between a scoot and a hobble), and get on the plane.

P1010055 The plane is made for people five feet tall. My knees are through the seat in front of me. I think my face is the back of the dude’s head in front of me. Heather is getting claustrophobic. But luckily we’re so tired we sleep most of the way and make it to Delhi no problem. Got to the hotel, and we’d never been so happy!

P1010061Then Heather started to come down with a bad cold and I continued to try to stretch by back.

Comments

  1. Steve IbarraOctober 9, 2009 at 8:23 AM

    Ed,
    Thanks for sharing. I have had back pain like this before and yeah, it's not fun. Especially on your vacation. Sounds really fun. I will try and read the rest of your posts too. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. EdOctober 9, 2009 at 12:22 PM

    Thanks Steve. Luckily we're feeling better now and then are roaming London.

    ReplyDelete

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