Back Home... A Day Late

As I wrote in my last post, yours truly messed up on the date of my departure from Mexico.  I had it in my mind that I was leaving on September 7th, when in fact I was supposed to leave on the 6th.  Fortunately I had no problem getting a one-way ticket home for yesterday, and it did not cost too much.

My flight was scheduled to leave at 7:30 AM, and very early in the morning, Alejandro drove me to the airport.

The flight from Mexico City to Houston was pleasant.  The plane was not very crowded, and I had the section of three seats all to myself.  I scooted over to the window seat and took a few pictures.

While we were on the runway, awaiting our turn to take off, the silhouette of the volcano Popocatépetl briefly made an appearance from among the clouds.

There were still puddles from the heavy rains last week which temporarily flooded the airport.

There was a long line of planes waiting to take off, and after a half hour we finally were in the air.

As we made our descent to Houston, I could see no obvious signs of the disastrous flooding from Hurricane Harvey last week.  I had lunch at one of the restaurants at the airport, and I talked with a couple of the employees there.  One of them lost her home in the flooding.  The other said that her home was not damaged, but that there was flooding all around her.  She was stuck in her house for four days.

My flight to Cleveland was not as pleasant since the plane was very full.  But we arrived  around 4:30 PM, twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

When I got up this morning, I read the news on the internet about the earthquake which hit Mexico last night around midnight.  It was an 8.1 magnitude quake, about the same as the devastating earthquake which destroyed much of Mexico City in 1985.  The hardest hit areas were the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Tabasco, and the death toll at this point stands at 58.  In Mexico City the earthquake was strongly felt, but major damage was not reported.  

I immediately wrote an email to my friend Alejandro, and he called me a short time later.  He and his family are fine, and the house appears to have come through the quake with no damage.  It was, however, a terrifying experience.  Classes at his nephew's school were cancelled today so that the building could be inspected.

On top of this, Katia, a Category 2 Hurricane, is expected to hit the coast of Veracruz sometime tonight with 100 mph winds.  It is a serious threat to the coastal region, although once it comes to the mountains, it will break up very quickly.  By tomorrow afternoon it is predicted to be nothing more than a tropical depression.  Mexico City will probably get nothing more than rain.  (However, as I have written previously, Mexico City does not handle heavy rains well.)

I guess I made it out of Mexico just in time.