Marooned in Malta Post 3: the L.O.N.G road home

The picture is from Our Lady of the Victories church in Valletta, one of the last sites we visited before we went into quarantine. Many memories, but now the question is …

How are we going to get home? Sprawled out on a double bed in our rented home in Mdina, three of the remaining travelers spent hours searching for flights home and figuring out how we were going to pay for them. We had already bought round trip tickets months ago but couldn’t use the return portion because the coronavirus grounded flights from Malta. At last we found a flight from Malta to Heathrow in London. We went to the Malta airport hours early so see if we could confirm the final legs of our trip home. We would have to stay overnight with all our luggage at Heathrow, then – we thought — leave early the next morning for Toronto, and ultimately home to Minneapolis.

We envisioned long waits at immigration and customs at Heathrow. But the airport was nearly deserted and we passed through immigration and customs without much difficulty. Perhaps all the fights had left for other destinations because of the P-word (Pandemic was only way to describe what was happening). Once inside the arrival area we found plastic chairs designed with no way no way to stretch out, so we sat surrounded by our luggage. A nice porter directed us to a coffee shop that had leather couches. Ah, the crowds we were expecting were all here. The barrista, an aspiring disc jockey, blasted out music that made it impossible to sleep. Worse, the barrage continued all night. After a recon mission, I realized that all the sofas were occupied by the sleeping, or the pretending-to-sleep. I didn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t stop worrying if taking an earlier flight would have been the right idea. Why did I even want to take this trip? We only had two days of sightseeing before we were quarantined. Hardly a great introduction to Malta for our friends. They will hate us.

Watching our bags and carry-ons while the others slept in shifts, I tried to remember the words to the Monty Python song about worrying about luggage at Heathrow. I found it later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-prhaikK9I

Four a.m., the time to check in for our flight to Toronto, finally came. Suddenly the airport was packed. We found a line for Air Canada, where we planned to pick up boarding passes for Toronto. The line also had signs for several Asian airlines and after a while we realized we were (a) the only non-Asians in the line, and (b) the only people not wearing face masks. After we inched ourselves and our luggage through the line for about an hour, a harried-looking manager said if we wanted Toronto we had to go to another line. We obeyed and inched again for another hour before being told that no Americans were allowed on flights going to Toronto. We were told to go to the United Airlines check-in desk and see if they could come up with a flight to the States. We found two lonely-looking agents talking with customers and no one else in line.  In an irritatingly friendly voice, the agent asked if we minded going through Newark. Did we mind? Will that get us home? We love Newark!

She did the paperwork and rather casually told us the flight to Newark would leave at 8:00 a.m.and the plane had already started loading. The clock said 7:50. The electronic sign to the loading gate said it was 12 minutes away. We sped as fast as septuagenerians could, following directions to a moving sidewalk, dragging our bulky luggage and running past the other pedestrians … to the next sidewalk. 7:53. Two minutes later to the next conveyor. 7:56. Then another. Panting for breath, I arrived at the gate desk alone. “There’s three more behind me.” Two clerks sprang into action and printed out more paperwork for each of us. We were the last ones aboard.

The transatlantic flight was uneventful and the Newark flight to Minneapolis was on a comfortable little plane, four seats across with an aisle between.  Uber got us home safely from the airport. At this writing, nearly four weeks after leaving Malta, we are still trying to get refunds on the “extra” flights. My mathematically-inclined fellow traveler calculated that it took 38 hours to get from Malta to Minneapolis, disregarding time zone changes. In normal times, it’s about 16 hours.

Believe it or not, we are thinking of taking another group to Malta next year. Want to join us? What adventure might await?

P