While I was busy enjoying my travels to Morocco, despite the lack of sleep involved in the many stops, my mother was having a very different travel experience. It was not until I was already in Ponta Delgada, checking my e-mail for one last time before getting on the plane, that I realized that my mother’s flight had been delayed for a whole day and that she would be unable to meet me in Lisbon as we had planned. By that point I was only one two-hour flight from Lisbon myself. I have already noted that my mother ended up getting to Casablanca as I was leaving it, and that I saw her arriving on the plane that I would take on its return trip to Lisbon, where I waited for her until seeing her as I was waiting for my dinner to finish.

When we finally got together, she had quite the story to share. In order to make the flight to Lisbon, she had already needed to spend Sunday night in Miami, because apparently there weren’t any Juneteenth flights to Miami that she would have been able to make in order to get to Miami before the afternoon, which is highly unusual as there are often several daily flights that make the short route from Tampa to Miami, a route I frequently took when I lived in the area myself as the first or last stop on my journeys. As it happened, though, there were weather problems in Miami and flights were being delayed left and right. At some point, the crew hit its time limit and required mandatory rest, and the flight was cancelled for that night and rescheduled for the following night, which required all of the passengers of that flight–there were apparently some 300 or so–to be given vouchers for dinner and a hotel.

Given that TAP (Air Portugal) does not maintain a large staff in Miami, which is not a particularly major hub for the airline, their staff was overwhelmed with the need to give out vouchers for their now-stranded customers. My mother befriended one nervous person who had a particularly difficult time with stress over the delayed flight and the hotel mishaps where the same room had been assigned to multiple passengers, but even if Miami was not the place that one would have wanted to spend the night–it would have been more enjoyable to spend it en route to one’s travels–one has to make the best of the reality of the situation, and what could not be changed was dealt with as cheerfully as possible.

And so it was that my mother ended up taking the flights that we had planned, but in a highly abbreviated form, making it on the red-eye from Miami to Lisbon, then turning around after a short layover to arrive in Casablanca, spending a few hours in the airport and then turning around to fly back to Lisbon for a couple of hours before we made our delayed flight to Malaga, where we are as I write this. Throughout this TAP has been consistently late with flights, both with operational matters as well as with delays relating to Lisbon flight controls. But TAP’s problems themselves are a subject for another time.