Durham Mayor Bill Bell is sharing about his trip to Riydah, Saudia Arabia. This first update is from Friday, May 8 at 2:10 p.m.

What started out to be a departure from RDU Airport on Thursday, May 7at 5:30pm to Washington Dulles International Airport ended up being a departure from RDU airport on Friday, May 8 at 10:11am to Washington-Dulles on United Airlines.

My flight on UA on May 8 was canceled; I was then put on a UA flight scheduled to depart at 7:30 p.m., which was further delayed to depart at 8:50 p.m. That was too much of a delay to make my scheduled connection at Dulles at 10:00 p.m. I spoke with the staff at the Saudi Embassy and they rescheduled my departure for today.

I am now sitting at Dulles with a scheduled departure at 4:40 p.m. from Dulles on Air France to arrive in Paris Saturday, May 10, 2009 at 6:10 a.m,. then departing Paris at 1:50 p.m. and arriving in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at May 10 at 8:55 p.m. It is a beautiful day at Dulles, and hopefully with no further delays, I should be in Riyadh tomorrow night. Staff of the Saudi Government will meet me in Riyadh and I will join the rest of the delegation of Mayors, who I am assuming did not encounter the travel delays I experienced.

This is only one of the issues with traveling by air; it is something that I couldn’t control, so I did not worry about it. I learned early in life to only worry about those things you have some control over, and after you know that you have done your best, don’t worry. Things happen for a reason.  As it turned out, I was expecting a document at my office but left before it arrived. My delay allowed me to stop by my office where the document had arrived; otherwise, I would not have seen it until my return on May 14, 2009. C’est la vie, C’est la vie.

If I have time and my wireless holds up, I’ll e-mail when in Paris otherwise sometime when I am in Saudi Arabia again, assuming my wireless connects.