Pandemic Diaries Week #3.75 - The Evacuation Flight

5 April 2020

Okay, so in the last blog, I explained that I contacted the US Embassy on Facebook (of all places!) and said that we'd been waiting for a flight for nearly two weeks, kept submitting more information as it was requested, and we were still in Peru.  That we were older adults with underlying medical conditions XYZ and QRS.

That afternoon, we received notification from the Embassy that we were officially on a flight manifest and our flight would leave Lima on 3 April!!  Woohoo!!!

So we finished our packing and printed up the necessary documents: the emails of notification so there was proof we were on the flight manifest, the promissory notes that are used to notify us of payment for the flight, and the letter from the Embassy that we should use in transit in case we get stopped.

Now, I should pause to say that things tend to happen to me that often don't happen to the average traveller.  Even during my first travels overseas, things just happened.  (Our family ended up in downtown Athens during a coup d'état.)  So, keep that in mind as I explain our Day of the Evacuation Flight.

On Friday morning we packed sandwiches at breakfast and filled our bottles of water.  Took our luggage downstairs, checked out, and requested a taxi.  I was armed with all that paperwork and our passports.  Richard helped load up the taxi, and we were off.

Good thing I had all of those documents - at random checkpoints, we were stopped by police and military personnel, some with scary automatic or semi-automatic weapons.  Our taxi driver had to show his emergency taxi authorization from the government.  We would be asked something in Spanish, I'd offer "la carta del paseo por volar" - the letter of passage to fly.  It was the best I could do to explain.  Once we were also asked to show our passports, but once the guy saw they were from the US, he said "Okay, thank you!"

We must have been stopped about six times!!!  Finally, we arrived at the US Embassy building, and the line of people and suitcases wound around two sides of the block, even though we were early.  So we had our driver pull up to where there were some official looking people, and we unloaded the luggage.  Because Richard isn't quite able to stand up straight with this back injury, I knew he really didn't need to stand on that really long line.  One of those official people ran over to help, and expedited us through the line.  There weren't any wheelchairs available, but one man put our luggage on a cart and made sure it got to a bus.  Another person had Richard sit in the shade and sent me from table to table - submitting our name for the flight manifest, handing over the passports, handing in the promissory notes, on and on.  

It took a while, but finally we got sent to a bus.  Turned out that our bus was the old and infirm person's bus - some of the people showed up in wheelchairs and could barely make it up the three steps to get into the bus!  Other buses filled up and drove by, but we just sat, slowly filling up with anyone who seemed to need extra time or assistance, including a few families with very small children.

After what seemed like forever, all the people were processed, the buses filled, and we headed to the airport - with a police motorcycle escort!  The cops on bikes would put on their sirens and zoom ahead to close intersections and block traffic so all eight buses could drive on through without interruption or being separated from each other.  Other police seemed to be stationed along our route, also stopping traffic so that we could drive on through.  We were the last bus in our caravan, so I could see the motorbike cops zooming alongside to the next intersection, sirens blaring.

At the military base, the buses drove up to a hangar that had been set up as the evacuation flight staging area.  Because we were the "special" bus, we mostly stayed on the bus and didn't need to go through the hangar to finish the processing.  US military people (I think mostly Marines) would come on the bus and explain the procedures in English and Spanish - one person per family needed to get off the bus and make one pile with their group's carryon luggage, and then work with an airline person to tag and group their checked luggage.  Leave the carryon outside.  When we were done and back on the bus, a dog was brought through to sniff the luggage - a cute golden Lab who seemed way too cheerful to be a bomb-sniffing dog.  He was rather interested in one particular bag that probably had lunch in there, burying his face all the way down into the bag.  Later, the police brought another dog, a shepherd type dog, who was much more serious and sniffed every bag as well - and buried her face in that same lunch bag.  They were pretty funny!

Turned out we were on a United flight - they disembarked a planeload of people, most likely Peruvians who had been living in the US but opted to be repatriated to Peru during this pandemic.

As people in hazmat suits went on the plane to disinfect it, clear out the trash, and reset things like seats and blankets, the Customs officials came through our bus to check and stamp our passports.  Next, a Marine came through, handing out little pieces of paper with seat assignments to each family group, ensuring people would sit together.  We ended up with 3G and 3L, and I realized we were in either business or first class!  Nice!  I think at this point, when people realized we were good to go, the bus people started applauding for the various people who helped us through this long process.  (This was now about 5 hours since we'd been told to arrive at the Embassy.)  

Finally - FINALLY - it was our turn.  The people who had been processed in the hangar started walking out to the plane and boarding from the rear, but our bus of the elderly-ish drove right out to the bottom of the stairs by the plane.  Several Marines very carefully and slowly assisted some of our more fragile passengers up the stairs, slowly being the operative term.  I guess this was why we were in business class, so that these very slow passengers didn't need to walk very far.

It was a pretty normal flight.  Friendly flight crew, mediocre food.  At least we had really comfortable seats in those little cubicle spaces, and the seat could be reconfigured into bed mode, so I got in a little nap.  The whole flight was about 7 hours or so.

The only excitement was that the man in back of me had a bit of a medical emergency.  He ended up with half the flight attendants and two medical people talking to him, taking blood pressure, oxygen, etc.  One flight steward was emailing the guy's whole medical history and symptoms to the CDC as well as the captain, both to be sure this wasn't a case of Covid-19 and to see if we needed to make an emergency medical landing.  The man  was in his late 80s and diabetic, so they gave him some juice and he felt better, although they think he passed out a couple of hours later.  People kept coming by to check on him, both our flight crew and the two Spanish-speaking medical people.

When we landed in Washington DC, we were asked to remain seated while some medical personnel came on board to assess the guy.  And then they ended up bringing on one of those skinny wheelchairs to roll him on out to a gurney.  (We didn't see any ambulances, so we figure he was pretty okay.)

All the normal stuff with Customs and Immigration, pick up the luggage, and so on.  We found a lounge area to sit down and Skype Richard's brother, and then we decided to go to a hotel for the night.  Packed up our carryon, headed out.  Once we arrived at the hotel, I realized that I lost our passports!  (I think they fell out of my pocket when some other things fell out of my pack, so I missed the passports while picking up everything else.)  ACK!!!!  Of course, I had trouble sleeping that night, I was so stressed!!!

Since I was up early in the morning, I figured I'd just go back to the airport and see if possibly the passports were still where we'd been sitting, or maybe turned in to lost and found.  It took me a while to find the lost and found area (way down in the luggage pickup carousel area, in the far back corner).  I talked to the airline's lost and found guy, who didn't have our passports.  Once I guaranteed that we lost the passports in the airport (because we got through Customs just fine so I had the passports through that section), he called the airport police to see if someone could open the airport lost and found area, and see if our passports were in there.  (Just to keep things balanced, there was also a TSA lost and found, for items accidentally left behind at the TSA screening stops.  Yes, three distinct lost and founds.)

It took about 30 minutes for the two airport police people to show up, but the woman police walked up and said "So, passports?"  I explained that yes, I seemed to have lost them last night when we took out our computers to call my husband's brother.  She unlocked the door, picked up a passport, and read out Richard's name!  I of course threw my hands in the air in a universally triumphant gesture and said, "And Phebe Schwartz!  YAY!"  So she handed me my passport, and I had to quickly tell her that Richard was my husband and I needed his passport too!!!  

As I started to leave, both passports in hand, I told her I was so happy I could hug her, but I knew I shouldn't.  She said, "Please don't.  Just a thank you is good."  We laughed, and I thanked them once more.

WHEW!  What a 24-hour period!!!  

We decided to stay one more night here in Virginia, since we both need to catch up on our sleep.  Tomorrow, we'll head to Union Station in Washington DC, and catch a train to Philadelphia.  Then head to southern New Jersey, where we've booked a hotel for two weeks.  Again, another period of quarantine or self-isolation or social distancing or whatever term you prefer.

But that evacuation flight was such an ordeal, I thought it deserved its own blog!  I mean, between the police and military checkpoints, the processing, the flight, the medical emergency, and the loss (and then retrieval) of the passports, it was quite the roller-coaster day!!!