Greg's Guests at Casa Pina
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We certainly enjoyed our two weeks with Greg in Mexico, and on the 22nd found ourselves not wanting to leave. But leave we had to.

The Trip to the Airport

Greg had been a wonderful host, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Our car showed up right on time; we had the same driver taking us back to Guanajuato airport as had brought us from there two weeks ago.

The weather was better than when we arrived, and I got some good pictures on the way back to the airport. Some of these are below:

We arrived at the airport in plenty of time for our flight. Since we had talked quite a bit with our driver, Roberto, both on the way to San Miguel and now on the way back, we thought it appropriate to get a couple of pictures:

After a very pleasant ride over to the airport, we left Roberto to wait to pick up Kay and Daryl, two more friends of Greg's who were arriving for their own week in San Miguel. Little did we know that the "pleasant" part of the day was pretty much over.

We carried our bags into the terminal and went to American check-in, got our bags checked, and headed to the gate.

This was the check-in area at BJX- pretty typical.

While we were sitting at the gate, waiting for the incoming flight to unload, Fred took this picture out the window.

At one point I went over to the glass partition separating the incoming passengers, who had to clear Mexican immigration and customs, from those of us waiting to leave. I did see both Daryl and Kay and wished them both a good week with Greg. Then I went back to wait with Fred.

Eventually, our flight was called and we headed down the jetway to the plane. People were stopped in the glass-walled jetway, waiting to board, and the scuttlebutt was that the plane was still being cleaned. Why they'd called the flight before that was done didn't ring true to me. Eventually, after more than a half-hour of waiting, it was announced that the flight was cancelled and that we'd all have to fly tomorrow.

The story we all pieced together at that time was that the flight crew, which was doing a turnaround back to Dallas, was told to leave the plane, clear customs, and then return to the plane- this by some local authority who actually incorrectly demanded that they do so. The story was the the flight crew refused to get off the plane so the flight was cancelled.

Now we all had to get back to the ticket counter for meal and hotel vouchers for the night, and to get rebooked on the next flight out in the morning. In addition, we had to collect our luggage and take it with us to the hotel. All this took an inordinate amount of time for a planeload of passengers, and it wasn't until after 9PM that we were on our way to a hotel near the airport.

We got a room and then waited in the lobby for the hotel to put out a meal for the thirty or so passengers staying there, but we finally did get something to eat and headed off to bed.

Early the next morning, we got a shuttle to the airport to check in for our flight. Now the problem was that the customs cards we'd filled out two weeks earlier with a return date of August 22 were invalid, as it was now August 23! I pretty much lost it when the bag check agent directed me to the customs office to get it straightened out. Not speaking Spanish, I knew THAT would be an exercise in futility. So I demanded that the agent accompany me to the customs office to do the talking which he acquiesced in doing. After a half-hour of negotiations, it was all straightened out and we were headed through security to our flight.

As it turned out, the plane was the same one that had come in the night before, but they had moved it way down the aircraft parking apron to free up the gate for the scheduled flights today. So we all had to walk a long way down the tarmac to find the plane, and of course use an outside stairway to get on it.

This we did, and the flight finally left for Dallas. As it happened, I found myself sitting across the aisle from an American flight deck officer deadheading back to Dallas, and I asked him if he knew the full story of what had happened the night before. He did. It was true that an inexperienced Mexican airport employee had demanded that the flight crew debark and go through customs, but it was NOT true that they had refused. They had done so, but when they returned to the plane, they were no longer "legal". That is to say, they had (or would have before landing in Dallas) exceeded their allowed daily flight time, which would not have happened had they not had to debark and waste the better part of an hour.

So it was the Mexican official's adamant demand that caused our flight to cancel, not some screw-up by American. I did learn that flight attendants often find their time limits exceeded while in the air on their way to the end of the day, and that the FAA allows this so long as the crew are compensated for the extra time. But pilots are a different matter; the rules for them are enforced much more strictly. While they, too, can find themselves over limit if the flight is, say, delayed in the air before landing, but a flight is not allowed to take off if it is known for sure beforehand that a pilot will become "illegal" during the flight. And that was the case here.

The flight back was uneventful, and Fred got a couple of good pictures on takeoff and in the air:

While our trip might have ended on a sour note, the two weeks we spent with Greg and his friends in San Miguel Allende were the most enjoyable so far this year.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	Greg's Guests at Casa Pina
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