Aero Maybe

What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?

It was the mid-80s. I was fresh out of college. I had mile-high curly hair, a killer tan lingering from an entire summer spent at the beach and, in my hand, a plane ticket to Ixtapa, Mexico.

What could possibly go wrong?

Weeks earlier, my friend Maureen and I had spotted an ad in the back of Glamour magazine for a resort in Ixtapa. That’s how we found vacations back then, kids. There was no Expedia. No TripAdvisor. No Google reviews from Susan in Ohio complaining that the continental breakfast only had three kinds of muffins.

You flipped through a magazine, saw a picture of a palm tree and thought, Looks fabulous. Book it.

Maureen and I worked at The Big G—GEICO—before it exploded into the insurance giant it is today. Maureen was a Sales Supervisor and I was writing training manuals for Customer Service. Our regional supervisor’s husband, Morris Rosenberg, was a travel agent for a cruise line.

We told Morris we didn’t want a cruise, but could he hook us up with a resort?

A few days later, ten glossy, colorful brochures arrived at the office.

We studied them like we were choosing a new home.

Two weeks later, we were on a flight to Mexico for seven days of sun, unlimited drinks and as much fun as two New York girls in 1987 could possibly get into.

Again.

What could possibly go wrong?

The first few days are admittedly a blur. Severe sunburns. Tequila hangovers. Hair that somehow grew larger with every passing day.

It was glorious.

By Day Five, the burns had turned to tans and we were ready to resume our regularly scheduled programming.

Now, if you think I’m chatty, you should meet Maureen. This woman could charm the pants off you, interview you and somehow get you to reveal your deepest childhood trauma before you realized you had even told her your last name. She is a marvelous conversationalist.

We were early for dinner reservations one evening, so naturally we waited at the bar.

Another margarita?

Why yes. Thank you very much.

Sitting beside us was a mother and her two grown daughters. Small talk became more talk. They were from New Jersey. They all worked in New York City. Mom was a retired physician who had recently lost her husband, and her daughters had given her this trip as a gift.

They were great fun.

Twenty-one minutes later, they invited us to join them for dinner.

Naturally, we said yes.

Because who turns down a dinner invitation from complete strangers you’ve known for almost half an hour?

Somewhere around the clearing of the appetizers, we heard a roar.

Not just a noise.

A ROAR.

The loudest, deepest rumbling sound I had ever heard.

Maureen looked at me.

“Oh, that’s just the laundry cart rolling by outside.”

Que?

I rolled my eyes.

“Ladies, she’s loopy. It’s clearly a plane taking off.”

The airport was 90 minutes away.

Then the chandeliers started swaying.

Waiters suddenly appeared with our checks—even though our dinners hadn’t arrived.

“Señoritas,” they calmly explained in their best broken English. “There is an earthquake. Please exit onto the beach. You will need to walk the shoreline back to your hotel. Buenas noches.”

Que?

WHAT?

We bid adieu to Mama Doc and her flock and headed for the beach.

Very obedient travelers.

Just two New York chicks wandering along the shoreline during an earthquake in Mexico.

Completely normal.

I have no idea how long it took us to make it back to our resort, but eventually we arrived and found one of the pool bartenders.

“What is happening?”

He waved away our concern.

“As long as there is no crack in the swimming pool, everything is completely fine.”

Que?

WHAT?

Apparently, this was the Mexican Richter Scale.

No crack in the pool?

Carry on.

Our flight home was scheduled for the next day. Nobody had any information because, remember, this was 1987.

Cell phones?

What are they?

Somehow we made it to the airport the following day. How? No recollection whatsoever.

What I do remember is arriving to find—

No flights.

Because apparently an earthquake wasn’t enough excitement for one vacation.

Morris Rosenberg had booked us on AeroMexico for the trip home. Direct flight to JFK. Perfect.

Except the airline workers had decided that the very first day of their strike would also be the very day of our departure.

Of course they did.

Hours later, we were placed on another AeroMexico flight that “might” leave.

Maureen immediately renamed the airline:

Aero Maybe.

We shuffled down the counter to American Airlines, where an agent typed into a computer roughly the size of my current kitchen and eventually produced boarding passes for a 2:00 a.m. flight to Dallas.

They gave us hotel and transportation vouchers AND a free domestic flight to use within the next year.

Boom.

Done.

We had hours to kill, so we took the shuttle to the hotel across the street, showered, freshened up and then wondered what two responsible young women should do until their 2:00 a.m. flight.

Our feet took us downstairs to the bar.

Naturally.

There we found a whole group of people booked on our flight.

We had a drink.

Then two.

Then the tequila shots started.

I swear, if cell-phone cameras had existed in 1987, I would STILL be a viral TikTok video.

That hotel bar erupted into a party that rivaled anything I had witnessed in college.

Dancing on the bar.

Singing.

Swan diving into crowds of people.

Crowd surfing.

And I’m pretty sure this was before karaoke was even a thing.

My next clear memory is waking up in seat 24D beside a guy named Mike Kelley who worked in New York City.

Maureen was two rows behind me with some German businessman named Karl.

Que?

WHAT?

I looked at my watch.

The sun was coming up.

We were still on the tarmac.

It was 6:00 a.m.

Our 2:00 a.m. flight had never left.

Apparently, the plane needed a part for the air conditioner.

Then came the captain.

“Folks, our crew needs to have this part installed. Shouldn’t be much longer.”

Oh my.

Four hours later?

Still on the tarmac.

No deplaning.

Just sitting there.

Finally, around 11:00 a.m., the seatbelt sign came on.

I looked toward the stewardesses—yes, they were still called stewardesses then—and watched them make the Sign of the Cross before fastening their seatbelts.

Excellent.

Very reassuring.

At that exact moment I thought:

I am not going to live to see 23.

Mike Kelley woke up with drool on his golf shirt.

Maureen and Karl were still deep in conversation.

And somehow, miraculously, we landed in Dallas.

Where another announcement awaited us.

There was no crew available to process the international passengers.

So we would continue on to Chicago.

Of course we would.

At this point, one thought finally hit me.

How will my parents know I’m alive?

Surely the earthquake had made the news back home.

There were no cell phones. No texting. No Find My Friends. No “Marked Safe on Facebook.”

Just my parents somewhere on Long Island wondering where in God’s name their daughter was while I toured the United States with Mike Kelley, Karl and Aero Maybe.

Long story longer, our plane finally arrived at JFK approximately two and a half days after our journey home had begun.

We were crispy.

Exhausted.

Beyond dehydrated.

Maureen’s father, a retired NYPD officer, picked us up at the airport. My parents met me at Maureen’s house.

And because we were young and apparently indestructible—

we went to work the next day.

When we saw our supervisor, we launched into the story.

The earthquake.

The airline strike.

The hotel-bar Olympics.

The broken airplane.

Dallas.

Chicago.

The missing two and a half days of our lives.

She stared at us blankly.

Not an ounce of sympathy.

Then, in the finest Long Island accent imaginable, she shrugged and said:

“So? So you saw a lot more of America than you wanted to. So what?”

Nearly forty years later, Maureen and I still howl over that line.

And maybe that really is the moral of the story.

Travel teaches you things. It broadens your horizons. It introduces you to new people, new cultures and new experiences. Sometimes it even introduces you to Mike Kelley in Seat 24D and a German businessman named Karl.

But most importantly, I learned that when life throws you an earthquake, an airline strike and a broken airplane all in one vacation, there is really only one important question to ask:

Is there a crack in the pool?

No?

Perfect.

Another margarita, please.

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Author: KikiFikar

Kiki Fikar is a native New Yorker who is passionate about taking the day to day life we all experience and sharing it in her tales from Suburbia. She will often be found at the gym, writing snippets each day for future story lines, listening to her two children create their lives, and building the perfect beachfront home and writing retreat in her mind.

50 thoughts on “Aero Maybe”

      1. i’m so glad though you made the most of the trip. speaking of making the most, we’re headed out to the pool for the afternoon. i think this is the last day temps will allow for a comfortable swim. enjoy the rest of the Sunday! 🙂

        Liked by 1 person

  4. What a great story, all these decades later. You know how to travel and have fun – and to make the most of an earthquake and airplane delay. I do miss the pre-Internet and phone days too. People just knew how to unwind and enjoy the moment more!

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      2. We were having a conversation at the gym yesterday and talking about all of our escapades when we didn’t know what fitness was… One of the guys looked at me and said I’m surprised we’re all still alive quite frankly lol we all had a good laugh over that one.

        Liked by 1 person

  9. Oh, this is too good! I laughed so hard, and it was a day when I really needed a laugh. Thanks for this. “No crack in the pool, everything is fine” is going to stick with me for a while 😀

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  12. What a fabulous story! I love the way you told it! That is definitely something to remember forever! I’ve never been out of the country, or west of the Mississippi River, so I’m always in awe of the travels that people go on!

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  13. I enjoyed and visualized the story about your trip. I imagined being there myself. And I am thankful I wasn’t. You and your friend sound like my kind of people. Back in the day there were a lot of trips and giggles, so to say. I don’t know about the longest trip, but I am grateful there weren’t video recorders back in the day capable of clearly documenting the ills of my youth. Some things are much better left to fading memories.

    And those memories are filled with people I hope I never run into again—at least not if they still remember me. I’ve certainly worked hard at forgetting who they were, hoping they’ve returned the favor when it comes to my youthful indiscretions and pranks.

    I’m pretty sure most of them are dead by now. But just in case they aren’t, I carry a fork.

    I still remember some of those loud voices and the colorful language they used. Frankly, I doubt anyone whose blood pressure climbed that high could have survived this long. And if they did, I’m counting on their long-term memory being questionable.

    But I can certainly relate to your experience—minus the mile-high hair, unless we’re talking about sitting high in a stadium.

    For me, summer also meant maintaining a suntan and spending as much time as possible at the lakes. One summer, I decided I was going to visit every state park in Oklahoma. That ambitious plan was pleasantly interrupted when I discovered what would become my favorite destination: Lake Tenkiller.

    Before long, it became something of a tradition. Several buddies and I would meet up a few times a year at a cabin on the lake. It was our retreat, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves…at least as far as any of us can remember.

    There were, of course, plenty of ways people managed to travel great distances back then other than by traditional means. I witnessed a few of those methods myself.

    For the record, I only watched. I never partook.

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    1. I’m laughing along with this! I knew we were on the same wavelength. Just knew it. Yes I’m surprised we are all alive here when I think of the shenanigans that went on. We shouldn’t be by any stretch of the imagination.

      I wish we had lakes around here. I hear about these amazing lake vacays and wish i had the chance to experience those. We have beaches but I live here so I travel to far away beaches. Lol

      As always thank you for reading and being here! ❤️❤️❤️

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  16. Nothing like a vivid, humorous, and well-told travel disaster story. You and Maureen clearly turned every calamity into a legendary adventure. And isn’t this what travel is all about? 😊

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  19. This had me laughing all the way through. “Aero Maybe” alone deserves to live forever, but I think “Is there a crack in the pool?” may actually be the best travel philosophy I’ve ever heard. What I love most is how perfectly this captures what travel used to be like before phones, apps, instant updates, and constant tracking. You just kept moving, met strangers, trusted the next step would somehow appear, and collected stories along the way. An earthquake, an airline strike, a broken plane, Dallas, Chicago, Mike Kelley, Karl, and still back to work the next day? That is some serious 1987 resilience. And your supervisor’s “So what?” might be the most Long Island ending possible. Absolutely loved this.

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    1. Thank you so very much! Whenever I look back and say hey maybe I haven’t done enough in my life I remember the stories like this and think – I’m really lucky! I’ll take fun and stories to tell over mundane things any day!

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  20. 1987, I remember that was the year I was in the City working for the real property dept. taking photos of people’s homes who did not pay their taxes. I learned more about the five boroughs of NY than I ever expected. Interesting times for all!

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