Palawan ACT 3:

 The Long Way Home 

What took me only one direct, painless hour to travel from home to Palawan took me seven circuitous, painful hours to get home. 

For some unexplained reason, my booking from Palawan to Manila was canceled or was no longer in the list of Philippine Airlines (PAL) when the organizers checked the night before my flight. And the only reason they double-checked was because son #3 kept asking me what was the exact time of my ETA in Manila. 

I kept replying, “Same, same.” 

But having the exact-to-the-last-detail genes of Tony, son #3 was persistent. So that’s how the organizers found out I was not in the list of passengers in the last PAL flight to Manila. 

They went to the PAL office to rectify the error, but because it was a super busy time in Palawan, no seat was available. So the best they could do was to book me a flight to Manila via Cebu (4 hours layover). Otherwise, I’d be staying in the Hotel alone (all GTA participants would have left) one more day. 

And so it was . . . one-and-a-half-hour flight to Cebu. Four hours at the Cebu domestic airport for my connecting, one-and-a-half-hour flight to Manila. 

When I got home it was 2 o’clock in the morning the following day!  

Again, grace traveled with me. All through my looooong way home (Dec. 5-6), this verse was my aerodrome beacon, speaking directly to me: