Planes, pains and automobiles!!!!!!

For anyone who has just found this Blog it's part of a chronicle of my life from living and working in the UK to living and working in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) via a 6 month spell in Lake Jackson, Texas.  If you want to read the 10 weeks leading up to the start of this Blog you can find it at www.whoneedsbeer.blogspot.co.uk.

For those of you who have already read it this is the next step.

I'm finally here!! After a 10 week wait it's actually happened although the transition from KSA to the US was slightly more traumatic than the UK to KSA.  My flight was from Dammam to Houston via a 4 hour stop over in Frankfurt, if I knew what was in store I would have refused to get on the plane!  The schedule was 23:35 depart Dammam.  Arrive at Frankfurt 06:25 local time. Depart Frankfurt at 10:00 and arrive in Houston at 13:45 local time. A total travel time of 22 hours 50 minutes spanning 9 times zones. 

The reality was as follows......
We set off from Las Dunas in Khobar at 8pm on Sunday evening for the 40 minute ride to King Fahd Airport in Dammam, arrived in good time and checked in.  2 hours to kill meant lots of sitting around drinking coffee and eating peanut M&Ms (I can't help it, they're too nice).  The flight left on time for the short 45 minute hop to Kuwait City for refuelling and more passengers, we left Kuwait at around 01:30 for an uneventful 6 hour flight to Frankfurt.  Found the gate at Frankfurt airport, which is massive by the way, for our connecting flight and found a bar for a well deserved beer and some breakfast.  The flight boarded at about 09:30 and took off on time for the 10 hours 30 minutes to Houston, so far so good.  This jetset lifestyle is easy although I don't think I've ever been so bored in my life, until I started this life journey the longest I'd been on a plane for was 5 hours to Egypt so 8, 9 and 10 hour flights were uncharted territory.  The flight should have landed at about 13:45 but seeing as we still had 400 miles to go at that time we reckoned on maybe a 45 minute delay, after doing a 360 degree loop about 300 miles away we started our final decent although with about 220 miles to go the plane did another 360 degree loop, not to worry we thought, the airport must be busy.  As I was watching the TV monitor that tracked our GPS position during the decent we got about 140 miles from Houston and the plane started to climb and turn to the left again, surely not another loop round, we were already 1 hour behind schedule!!! 
It is at this point that it all went pear shaped although just how pear shaped we couldn't have possibly imagined.
The Captain then announced that due to severe weather at Houston we were unable to land and due to a fuel shortage we couldn't continue to wait for the weather to improve so we would have to divert to Dallas and wait there.  At around 3pm we landed at Dallas-Fort Worth where we taxi'd to a refueling point and waited.......and waited........and waited.  At 6pm the Captain announced that the we still couldn't land at Houston and the Aviation Authorities wouldn't extend his flying time so we would have to disembark.  Another issue that then arose was that Dallas isn't a major airport and seeing as we were in a 570 seat Airbus A380-800 they weren't equipped to deal with a plane that size so we had to be bused the half mile or so to the terminal.  We headed off after being told that we had 3 options available

1. Board 1 of the 14 coaches chartered to drive us the 247 miles to Houston airport
2. Check into a hotel in Dallas and Lufthansa would arrange our onward travel the next day
3. Make our own way to our final destination

Immigration was surprisingly smooth considering they were swamped and I was sat waiting for my luggage at around 8pm, it turned up at 9.45pm!!!! We'd been on the go for nearly 35 hours now.
When we considered our options the hotel stayover was out of the question as we had to be in Houston and the thought of sitting on a coach for 4+ hours then getting a 30 mile taxi to the hotel didn't appeal so Jordan, Chris and I decided to get a one-way car rental and have a Texas road trip to drive the 277 miles to the hotel, the best of a bad situation but not brilliant to be honest.  We picked up the car at 10.30pm and set off via a service station on the outskirts of Houston for a McDonalds and Red Bull, not that we needed wings because we were bloody sick of them and for the 1st hour or so we changed drivers every 20 minutes due to fatigue but once we'd had a kip and some caffeine we were away.  We arrived at the Hotel Indigo in Galleria, Houston at around 2.30am, some 40 hours after we set off absolutely shattered, and feeling slightly less than clean so the 1st thing I did what have a shower and shave and eventually climbed into bed at 3am.
As journeys go I've never experienced anything like it and if I ever have to do it again it will be too soon.  We stayed in the hotel in Houston for 2 nights before travelling the 50 or so miles down to Lake Jackson on Wednesday to move to where we'll be living for the next 6 months, I'll go into that in more detail at a later date but for now I'll leave it there.

If someone said to me now that I have to get on a plane I'd probably shoot them!!!!