Airplanes and Airports; Part One.

During the month of June, I've flown on 8 different airplanes and passed through 6 different airport - twice.

Needless to say, planes and airports seem to be stuck in my mind at present; I'm hoping that writing about these experiences will exorcise these thoughts.

We left for our trip to Philippines on June 5, heading first to Atlanta's Hartsfield/Jackson airport. Because going from Atlanta is our obvious choice, we were given 3 options.
1) Korean Airlines to Inchon, then Manila.
2) Flying to LA on a domestic airline (probably Delta) then Philippine Airlines to Manila.
Since our last trip to Philippines, Delta had taken over Northwest Airlines, so option
3) was to take Delta to Japan (with one US stop in-between) then continue Delta to Manila.

Option 3 was the only one that fit within our budget.

Hartsfield /Jackson was pretty much uneventful - basically, check in, wait board the plane, then off to:
JFK to change planes to Tokyo/Narita. Nothing much to say about the experience of going through JFK on the way out, except that the lunch we had at the airport was, naturally, over priced and while not horrible wasn't wonderful either.

Due the flight being delayed at JFK, our lay over in Japan was shortened considerably. We pretty much just deplaned, went through security, then back on the same flight to continue to Manila.

At the International terminal in Manila, we were met by friends after going through customs and  baggage claims. We would have to take a taxi to terminal 3 for our overnight wait for the flight to Dumaguete. One of our friends arranged and paid for the taxi - 330 Ph pesos (roughly $8). We had arrived in Manila around 9:00PM and our flight to Dumaguete wasn't scheduled to leave until 8:40 AM. Our friends in Manila stayed with us in terminal 3 until time for us to check in.
As it turned out, our flight was delayed until around noon.Our 12 hour lay over became a 15 hour layover. Ouch.

What can I say about the Dumaguete airport? The planes do not pull up to a gate. It's just like in the old movies; you deplane by way of steps pulled up to the aircraft and walk across the tarmac into the building. Once  inside, it was simple enough getting our checked bags and then into the van the family had arranged.

Thankfully, there wasn't much to complain about concerning the flight to the Philippines. OK, the flights were long, as were the lay overs; the food was mostly edible, some of the movies were better than others. Sleep didn't always come easily. All of that's to be expected.

It wasn't until the return trip, that things became unpleasant.