Bill Young here blogging to you live from Akumal, Mexico! The sun is shining, the ocean is humid and filled with the sounds of animals that I’ve never seen and I’m in the bedroom of my villa with the lights off and the A/C on typing away on my laptop.
Right outside my window. Is that a coconut? Can I eat that? I'm gonna try to eat that later.
I hate what I’m about to do. The moment we got in we were greeted with a free meal and told all the comics were getting gift baskets full of goodies and coupons to local businesses. The villa was stocked with booze which we drank last night in a pool on the roof of the villa. The outside of the villa was crawling with these little gecko like lizards (adorably infested!). My only job here is to film a couple of sketches and perform in three shows. I really hate that I’m about to do this because I have no reason to complain but I’m going to bitch about the flight in.
Jena dropped me off at the MSP airport at 5:30 AM. I was set to fly out at 7:05 with 10 other people in the festival on a group flight rate. We were flying from Minneapolis Cancun with a stop in Dallas. Now, I’m a little scared of flying (part of my general fear of heights) but I’ve been on a plane about a half dozen times in my life and I’ve never really had a huge problem with it. The descent to landing is always a little nerve wracking but I’m usually fine the rest of the flight. We took off and the captain said over the intercom that there were some storms in Texas that we were going to fly around that may delay the flight a bit. I ate an airplane breakfast sandwich (which was delicious. Take that, ’80s stand up comics!), put my headphones on and dozed off listening to my ipod.
I woke up a couple of hours later and chatted with the other comics and listened to music as we approached Dallas. The captain came on the intercom again and told us there was lightning over Dallas right now and it was not safe to land. We were going to circle over Dallas for a while in a “holding pattern” to see if the storm clears up and if it didn’t, we’d land at the Wichita Falls regional airport to wait it out. It should take less than an hour but “we’re lucky we have enough fuel to circle over Dallas for a couple of hours”.
An hour passed and we were still circling around. The captain came on the intercom again and said that the conditions were still stormy so we were going to keep in the holding pattern. 45 minutes of more holding pattern and the captain told us that the Wichita Falls airport was so overrun with planes that were headed to Dallas that they were running out of fuel at that airport so we were going to keep circling and if it didn’t clear up we would go to Oklahoma Fucking City (he didn’t say “Fucking”) to refuel. We kept circling and I started trying to cope with the fact that this is where I live now. Time to start a new life in an airplane circling above Dallas and eating three dollar mini tins of Pringles (seriously they’re 75 cents at the gas station).
I started making a mental list of all the horrible things that could happen in a plane running out of fuel circling far far above Texas. We could just run out of fuel because of the captain’s foolish hope that Dallas would let us land. Just fall out of the sky into a high school football field (high school football fields make up about %60 of Texas’ geography). At least I’d finally get to see those oxygen masks pop out from the overhead compartment. I’ve only ever seen them in movies and always wondered if they even existed. Not many people survive plane crashes so you wonder if those masks even pop out when shit hits the fan. What if we hit another plane? We couldn’t be the only people waiting for Dallas to let us in. The Dallas sky was probably littered with circling planes and we were bound to crash sooner or later. Oh God there’s going to be a five plane pile up because of a storm WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST LAND IN WICHITA FALLS WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE, CAPTAIN? YOUR FOOLISH HOPE IN DALLAS LETTING US IN HAS DOOMED US ALL!
We landed in Dallas fifteen minutes later. For those of you keeping score that was two hours of flying in circles. We spent another hour in the runway because there were so many planes trying to get in all at once. Everybody on the plane bitched about it but I was just glad to be on the ground. I would’ve kissed the ground when we got off the plane but eww, Texas.