Our luck held. Our plane from Barcelona to New York took off on time Monday and some 20 hours later we were bouncing onto the runway at Little Rock National.

We saw stranded travelers all over — many sleeping on Red Cross cots at Kennedy Airport in New York. One traveler on our plane home had taken a 25-hour cab ride to reach Barcelona — at who-knows-what fare. On our Dallas-bound plane rode a young couple who’d started flying in Kazakhstan and went the long way around — through Beijing and New York — to get home to Texas in ash-free airspace. A fellow traveler on our cruise ship was stranded in Barcelona by the airport’s closure Sunday and told by American Airlines it could get him home, as it clears the backlog out of Spain, this coming weekend. And on it went. Many with travel insurance learned that some policies don’t cover acts of God such as these. Some do. Best to check that fine print.

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So, back to it, with lots of good memories, including (above) that heaping platter of seafood I got on the waterfront of a port in Morocco.

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