Phew! Well that was quite a thing let me tell you!

We arrived at OR Tambo international airport with plenty of time and were sitting on the plane at exactly due departure time (9:30 Sunday night SA Time) when the plane shuddered about 1/2 a meter back and Megz said "amazing, dead on time". Famous last words. The captain came over the loud speaker and said there was a problem with the toilets on the left-hand side of the plane and that they would try and fix them. They left us sitting on the plane for five hours then eventually cancelled the flight, ushered us all to a hotel and told us to be back at 7:00 Tuesday next morning. So, now my plans for meeting up with Donald in Okmulgee at 3:00pm on Tuesday were completely scuppered because we were to fly to Dallas on the Monday morning and take a leisurely drive to Okmulgee on the Tuesday and arrive calm and composed, meet everybody, setup and do a performance on Streetjelly etc.

So flights, car hire and hotel bookings were completely messed up.

After four hours sleep, we were back at the airport to be delayed a further 3 ½ hours. We arrived at JFK at 8:30 at night after a 15 hour flight. The American ladies and gents, working at the SAA counter could not have been nicer to the many, many exhausted travellers. The organized us a luxury hotel and booked us on the 6:30 flight to Dallas. We did some quick calculations and optimistically worked out that we could still make the 3:00 appointment.

We had brought our own GPS with us but need to download the US maps, so we didn’t manage much sleep in our luxury hotel. We managed to set off from Dallas at about 11:00 but soon discovered that our GPS was not talking to us and the confusing display saw us taking every off-ramp off route 121 and then the GPS getting us BACK on to route 121. This happened about 10 times before we worked it out. So time was tight.

Having conquered driving on the wrong side of the road, we roared into Rebold Manor at 2:55, where about 40 residents were seated in the lobby waiting expectantly. Unshowered and smelly, we streamed a rather rushed and technically challenging Streetjelly to about 30 people online and about 30 people in the lobby with a guitar not proper tuned and a mind not completely calm. The three of us (me, Meg and Don) later continued outside in Don’s wonderful gazebo with the Oklahoma breeze blowing and the stress disappearing.

Thank you Don and Rebold Manor, for welcoming us to Okmulgee and thank you PG Musicers who tuned in. The PG Musicers I think I saw Jazzmandan, Eddie, Richard, Kevin Emmerich, RichMac, DannyC, Floyd. Who else did I miss? Please let me know.

I will be posting some video footage soon…

(I am sure there is a song in there somewhere)

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