Bags of all shapes and sizes did laps before our darting eyes.
A dark blue bag, a leather bag, a red bag with a ribbon tied, repeat. I wondered if our weary bodies would be even able to lift our luggage after fourteen hours of travelling.
My life had been organised into two pieces of luggage and they should have arrived at Raleigh Durham International Airport by now. My friend Rachel and I would be spending the next six months on exchange in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and standing on jet-lagged legs waiting for luggage was not the exciting start to our adventure we were hoping for.
For a state where the Wright brothers first flew an airplane over 100 years ago, the American aviation industry was not doing a great job. Our day was full of flight delays and desperate scrambles to find different gates in oversized airports.
As midnight struck, so did our second hour of waiting in arrivals. We went to our air carrier who said our bags could be in Chicago, even though we never flew there, or Dallas, even though we never flew there or maybe they never left LAX.
We gave up and decided to flag down a cab. Heading outside, we remembered two important things. January meant winter in the Northern Hemisphere and here we were in shorts and t-shirts. That, and our jackets were in our bags, which were in Chicago. Or Dallas. Or maybe they never left Los Angeles.
We were on our own, stranded with nothing but some cash, our passports and a spare toothbrush.
I was told that one thing I would experience in North Carolina was southern hospitality. I was struggling to see any of it, but then, as I was ready to make a pillow out of my carry-on luggage, a cab driver came over to us.
“Where do you girls need to go? I’m the last cab of the night,” said the driver.
We noticed that he already had a customer, a woman sitting behind the driver’s side seat. He insisted she didn’t mind giving us a lift too, so we sped off past the pine trees to Chapel Hill.
“You two don’t have much luggage for such a long stay,” the cab driver said.
He explained how he had left Kenya and now called Chapel Hill home.
“Y’all are going to love it here. I know I do!” He exclaimed.
The cab hit Franklin Street, the three mile long main street of Chapel Hill and suddenly, it felt like an adventure. Like the small patches of snow in the streets, our troubles seemed to melt away with every passing second in Chapel Hill.
That cab driver was right, we really were going to love it here.
