On Saturday 20 July 2019 almost all 4Aviation travellers who had booked for the 4Aviation trip to Oshkosh convened at Lisbon airport. They came on flights from Amsterdam, Brussels, Düsseldorf and Paris. Two more, including the tour guide, were supposed to come from London, but the participant became ill in the plane, while taxiing to the runway, and was escorted of the plane, and accompanied to the hospital by our tour guide. This left us without a guide, but an experienced 4Aviation traveller was asked to help for the time being and he offered to help for the first stretch of the trip, which became rather eventful.
The TAP flight to Chicago in an ageing A330 was uneventful until the approach: a storm over the airport resulted in windshear conditions and two rollercoaster attempts at landing followed by a diversion to Detroit. This was the first thing that went wrong. More were to follow: a four-hour late arrival at Chicago, a two-hour delay at Immigration, one traveller received extra attention from Immigration (another hour), the car rental company had a computer crash (3 hours) compounded by a blocked credit card. So it was far into Sunday night that we set off in three cars to our first accommodation, half way to Oshkosh, where we arrived at 5 a.m. Originally we had planned to check in at about 6 p.m.
