While the weather out of Prague was clearing, and finally Rzeszow, Poland (pronounced "Z'ai-shoff" ....I think) was forecast to improve, we still had some pretty big mountains to get over, and of course those big rocks were still in the soup and well below freezing. It was hard to sit still as the sun burnt through the ground fog in Prague, and the engineers were getting ansty, having pressing maintenance issues that were quickly running out of time. But we had had enough as well, and soon we had the ole girls turning and burning and lifting into the blue for the better than three hundred mile hop to our maintenance facility in Poland.
Slightly over seven thousand miles of flying, some twenty-five days enroute, having flown through Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cote D'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, Senegal, The Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Germany, The Czech Republic, and finally Poland, some twenty-three countries in twenty-five days, having stopped in eighteen of those for fuel, overnighting in thirteen different countries, sleeping in seventeen different hotels, we dealt with taxi drivers and hotel staff and refuelers and airport officials and customs agents and police, paying exorbitant handling and landing fees, we were swindled in Nigeria, robbed at gunpoint by police in Benin, ate dust in the Sahara, mobbed by shopkeepers in Dakar, filled out reams of landing cards and beaten over the head with bureaucracy in Morocco, annoyed by the French, frustrated in Luxembourg, fell in love with Prague, and throughout it all, became good friends. It was a bitter-sweet adventure, with all the mayhem and bullshit intertwined with awe, everyone of us pushing forward to get the job done, but facing unemployment on arrival from a company that many of us had served for nearly two decades. Ever professionals, we did what we do best, right to the end.
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