My New Nightmare

The night Epril and I were supposed to fly to the Philippines, moving from Thailand, we wound up staying in a hotel instead of getting on the plane: We got "bumped" off the flight. The 6 suitcases we had our entire lives packed into totalled 120 kilograms... and we needed to cough up 25,000 baht (cash only) to get them all on the airplane. While I had enough cash to pay for getting our bags to Manila, I would not have had enough cash (due to ATM limitations) to pay a similar fee for our flight from Manila to Cagayan 8 hours later. So, at the airline's offer of waiving the overweight luggage fee (and saving us 25,000 baht, plus throwing in 2 round trip air tickets), we elected to wait 24 hours for our the next flight.

For years, I've had this recurring dream about being in an airport and running incessantly to find a flight and missing it. Now, here I was in a situation where not only was I missing my flight, but (quite literally) I had no place else to go: For the period between when I left Pattaya and arrived in Cagayan, I had no home. All of my belongings were in suitcases. And... to top it all off, I was now being ferried off to an unknown hotel in an unknown part of Bangkok.

It didn't particularly bother me at the time mentally. I wasn't panicking or anything, and I obviously had a big wad of cash if something went really wrong. However, now when I sleep, a lot of my "not-so-nice" dreams center around that situation. It was my old nightmare of running around an airport (which I actually did, trying to gather up as much cash as I could) and missing my flight come true, with the added stressful twist of winding up in a strange place and not having anyplace else to go.

Well, I suppose that would give anybody good fodder for nightmares.