Stranded.

As the midnight London news  announced Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption Lange was stranded indeed.

“Over Spring Break, I traveled over to Europe to visit my daughter and her husband in the UK. They live in Egham which is just to the west of London,” Lange explains as why she was near the area where this Icelandic volcano exploded on April 15 paralyzing air A across the Atlantic.  “It was chaos. The airports didn’t cancel their flights until they were absolutely sure they couldn’t fly. I really didn’t know what to do, when we were going to get home. Everyone in Europe was stuck. Luckily, since I was staying with my daughter, the costs weren’t extra for hotel and food.”

Trying to make the best of the situation, Lange used technology to her advantage.  “Luckily I had my flash drive with my lesson plans, worksheets and recipes so I could e-mail [Mrs. Herbst] everything, and she could stay on for three more days,” she continues, “I just tried to make it so she could run the class as smoothly as possible.”

According to sophomore, Kyra Weeks who is Lange’s 6th hour Foods class, things went just as fluidly as Lange had hoped.

“The first day Mrs. Herbst was there, we all suspected that we just had a sub. But then, we realized, ‘oh my gosh, Mrs. Lange is in Europe and there’s that volcano… and we put it all together’,” Weeks says. “Class went smoothly because the sub was very capable. She was a good teacher and we pretty much kept cooking and doing class as normal. It seemed kind of a positive thing for (Mrs. Lange), so that she’d get to spend more time with her grandson and daughter, she was not just stuck there.”

Because the volcano was hidden under an ice cap, debri and ash filled the sky closing down airports across Europe.  “A lot of people want to think that you could really see the ash and it was clouding the air, but in reality, it was so fine and so high up, you could hardly even notice,” Lange says, “but it was there, nonetheless, because even by the 20th, they were just starting test flights.”

Lange, who was flying through Air Canada back to Toronto, Canada then to Detroit, once again rescheduled her flight.

“They were using bigger airplanes and running more flights,” she says, “The plane that we were taking back must have had 500 people on it. It was packed full, every seat had a person in it.

Finally ??? days after her original departure date Lange arrived to the ??? airport ready for ??? hours ride home.

“Even though we arrived 3 hours early, we couldn’t even go in the airport. There were police barricades, and they asked what airlines you were traveling on and you had to ‘queue up’ or line up for your flight. It kept the mass confusion outside. Once you were allowed to go in, the screens didn’t post the gates until boarding time. When they were posted, people were like running to reach their planes. Everyone was ready to go home.”

While waiting for her flight to be posted, Lange listened to others share their stories.

“One lady had come to visit her daughter and grandson, who was being baptized, but one of her hop-flights to Rome was not available and so she had to buy another whole ticket to get home. It was a big mess. It was a huge mess.”

With all the disarray, Lange safely arrived home after about a 10 hour flight.

“Mrs. Lange’s return was a great celebration. We were all really happy that she had come back. She seemed really refreshed, with her pictures of her granddaughter, and we really just got back into the flow of things,” Weeks says.

After her homecoming, Lange did feel that the trip and all its events came together to be an interesting experience.

“I’m a grandma now, so it was a [life changing] experience,” she begins. “However, I did feel like a prisoner. Had I not have been in such a happy situation, I would’ve felt confined that my basic freedom had been removed from me, that I had no control, that I was only a pawn in a larger game.  Even though it was a natural disaster, it doesn’t change the emotional feeling to that kind of thing. There’s just nothing you can do.”