All about the timing

Timing is everything.
It was a bit of fortuitous timing when Corina’s e-mail came, and it was even more fortuitous when her plane arrived.
The e-mail arrived last Tuesday.
“I am coming to DC next week and I’ll get there 2 days before the start of the Internews conference,” she wrote. “I have this crazy idea now. If you are at home and your family would agree I could come visit you all.”
Corina is Corina Cepoi, who is the head of the School of Advanced Journalism in Chisinau, Moldova. For many years, she was the director of the Independent Journalism Center there.
We got to know Corina and her family in 1998, when I did a lot of volunteer consulting for the journalism center during our Fulbright experience. And we’ve maintained our contacts over the years. My last trip to Moldova in 2008 was to conduct training at Corina’s school.
So having her visit sounded like a terrific idea, a real treat, though it also looked as if it was going to require a little hustle on our parts.
Her schedule called for her to arrive on Saturday evening and depart for D.C. on Monday morning. That gave us a few days to do some housekeeping and get things ready in Connie’s study, which doubles as a guestroom. So does mine, but the bed in hers is more comfortable.
(One of the things that happens when three daughters grow up and move out is that you have extra rooms that can take on new life as a “study” or “den” or “guest room.”)
But when we looked at Corina’s flight information, there was reason for concern.
She was flying from Chisinau to Frankfurt, Germany then to Dulles International in Washington then on to Dayton, Ohio.
And the reservations called for a two-hour window for connections at Dulles.
That’s a little tight.
When international travelers arrive in any country, there is a gauntlet to be run. And the U.S. is no exception.
It begins when passengers are still in the air. Forms are passed out, some for returning U.S. citizens, some for people with green cards, some with visas as visitors.
On the ground, the first order of business is Passport Control/Immigration, where passengers are essentially sorted by nationality. Americans take their passports to one line where they are usually processed pretty quickly, often with a “Welcome home” from the person handling the paperwork.
The line for foreign visitors is longer, and it’s often not quite so congenial. Questions are asked, passports and visas are scrutinized, and some folks are challenged or turned back.
Once past Immigration, the scene resembles any other baggage claim, except on a larger scale.
Then, once bags are claimed, passengers have to haul them through Customs and turn in the paperwork on which they’ve declared what goods and items they’re bringing into the country. Most of the time, that goes smoothly. But these guys have a job to do, and it’s not uncommon to have passengers pulled aside to open their bags for a search.
With Customs and Immigration behind, passengers with connecting flights must go through a set of doors and re-check their large bags, handing them to personnel or putting them on a conveyor belt.
That’s followed by a near-sprint to the gate for a connecting flight, usually in a completely different terminal.
That was the gauntlet facing Corina on Saturday. She had two hours to complete the whole thing, assuming that her flight was on time, and that’s not a safe assumption.
If she missed her flight, she could get a later one. Trouble is, the later one was five hours later.
Just to make things more interesting, the length of the Washington-Dayton flight is almost exactly the same length as the time it takes to drive from Portland to Dayton.
I left the house at 5 p.m. Corina’s flight was scheduled to leave at 5:07 p.m.
If all went well, she’d arrive at 6:32 p.m. But if she missed the 5 p.m. flight, there was a good chance I’d get a call when I was halfway to Dayton telling me to come home.
So I drove and hoped my cellphone wouldn’t ring. About Deerfield, I knew the plane was in the air but had no idea if she was on it.
By Winchester, I was expecting a call at any second.
By Lynn, I decided that with every mile and every minute my chances were getting better.
It was almost exactly 6:30 p.m. when I walked from the new parking garage into the terminal at Dayton.
It was roughly 30 seconds later that I caught sight of Corina walking my way. She’d been traveling about 22 hours, but she was there on the dot.
Timing is everything.[[In-content Ad]]