I agree with you 100 percent Bug, when things don't go as planned, thank God for it and make the best of it because we may never know what may have happened if the delay or problem hadn't occured. Like your experience, sometimes we do find out though.

In November 1959, I was going home on leave from Okinawa. This was in the days before jet airlines and the prop planes made the cross ocean trip in stages with stops for refueling and rest, e.g. Okinawa to Tokyo to Wake Island, to Hawaii, to San Francisco.

I caught the plane from Okinawa to Tokyo fine but when I got to Tokyo, 13 of us got bumped off that flight to make room for a bunch of priority travelers. We had to spend the night at Tachikawa Airbase and catch the flight 24 hours later. We all groused and moaned about being the "unlucky 13', but as it turned out we were really the "Lucky 13".

Twenty-four hours later, we resumed our travel, stopped at Wake island and then made it on to Hickum Airbase, Hawaii. When we got in the terminal in Hawaii, someone noticed the newspaper headline about an airplane that was still missing and all passangers were presumed lost at sea. Yep, it was the same flight we had gotten bumped off of.

Since I am cronologically enhanced, I could cite several more examples, but none as clear or dramatic as this one.

Grumpy