Eat. Pray. Pageant.
How a chaotic US pageant trip taught me trust, timing, and tire changes in a tux
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For those of you who don’t know, I recently took a ten-day trip to Tennessee, USA to watch the Miss Volunteer America pageant, as well as to catch up with some friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.
To say it didn’t go according to plan would be an understatement.
Full disclosure — I haven’t actually watched "Eat Pray Love," but from my understanding, it’s a journey all about letting go and personal growth, so let’s run with that.
Act One: The Ticket Fiasco
For a start, American Airlines had somehow mixed up my outbound ticket, so I had to panic-call them from Sydney Airport to get the situation rectified. The man on the phone said he would have it fixed in five minutes — twenty minutes later the line went dead. I then had to call them back, fully expecting that I’d have to explain my situation all over again. Thankfully, their system had logged the call, and so the second guy said the first one would call me back shortly.
Understand, this was all happening while my flight departure time was creeping closer and closer, and I hadn’t even been able to clear security screening yet because I didn’t have a valid ticket. Also, I habitually set my phone to ignore all incoming calls from unknown numbers because I get so many junk calls, so I had to figure out how to turn that setting off.
Long story short, I managed to make my flight. Barely. The security agent was kind enough to allow me to cut the queue (something I would later find the TSA agents at DFW airport are completely disinclined to let you do), and so I made it — already a lot more frazzled than I would like to be.
In pageants, we’re often told that we shouldn’t attach ourselves to the eventual outcome. That we should enjoy the journey and not just fixate on the destination. We’re also taught that when God closes one door, another opens. It’s all sound, logical advice, but what I didn’t realise was that my trip was about to be a crash course in letting go.
As soon as I boarded my first flight, my heart sank. I had been given a window seat because of the ticketing debacle, whereas I always try to get an aisle seat so I can stretch my legs and go to the bathroom without clambering over anyone. Further, I was sat next to two let’s say "larger" women, and directly behind us were two parents with two screaming kids, both of whom decided to pass the time by kicking our seats.
Not ideal, right? But then, a couple of hours into the trip, the two women I was sitting with got so fed up with having their seats kicked that they demanded to be seated somewhere else. Next thing I knew, they were stomping off with their equally large carry-ons, and I had the entire row of seats to myself for the rest of the sixteen-hour (yes, really) flight.
One door closes. Another opens.
Act Two: Chaos at DFW
I touched down in DFW for my connecting flight to Memphis. Clearing the first round of security took a while, but was tolerable. Waiting for my bag, however, took forever. Not only that, but the luggage collection area was dark and dingy for some reason, and it was filled with hordes of people making it impossible to get anywhere. It eventually turned out that someone else had taken my bag off the carousel and left it in one of the back corners of the room, meaning I was extremely lucky to find it in the first place. But the problem now was that I was in danger of missing my connecting flight, so I bolted up to the TSA line and my heart sank. There was a huge long line, and of course, despite having six gates that could have been open, only two were.
I knew as soon as I saw that line that it was highly likely I was going to miss my connecting flight. If you don’t know, DFW is also one of those airports that’s big enough to have its own monorail system, so I didn’t only have to clear TSA, I also had to take a train.
One long queue, a train ride, and a very unhelpful TSA agent later, I made it to my gate. It was only a few minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart, so I was sure that I would be denied boarding. To my great surprise, the plane was still there and boarding when I finally got to the gate, completely sweat-drenched and emotionally exhausted. That winning feeling soon disappeared, however, as I found out that the reason the plane was still there was that there had been a mechanical fault with the first plane, and American Airlines had had to replace it with a smaller one. That meant they had to kick some people off the plane, and guess who one of those lucky people was? Yep, yours truly.
And so I missed my flight. However, the American Airlines rep at the gate was one of the most helpful human beings I have ever met. He was incredibly apologetic, and he also gave me confidence that my situation would be resolved as soon as possible. He ended up booking me on the second flight out, as well as standby on the very next one (which I ended up making), but because of the mechanical fault, he also gave me a $500 voucher for American Airlines that could be used by myself, friends, and family within the next twelve months.
The Unexpected Gift
Initially, I didn’t think much of the voucher, as it was highly unlikely I’d be booking a domestic flight within the US in the next twelve months, but just a couple of days later, an odd thing happened. There was a friend I was supposed to be meeting up with while Stateside, but she’d been going through financial difficulties and wasn’t going to be able to make it. I hadn’t seen this friend in years, so of course I was disappointed, but then my mind flashed back to the voucher, and how it could be used for friends and family. Next thing I know, we’ve used the voucher and got my friend a last-minute return flight without it costing either one of us a cent.
So the turmoil of my missed flight had led to a voucher that I was sure I didn’t need. But just a couple of days later, it turned out to be exactly what I needed.
One door closes. Another opens.
By this time, I felt that God really was beating me over the head with the same lesson over and over until I got it. And I won’t deny that I needed it. I’ve always been someone who thought that with enough preparation and planning, you could make sure everything turned out exactly the way you wanted. But if you’ve lived enough life in general, or done enough pageantry in particular, you know that the best way to make God laugh is to tell Him your plans.
But they say things tend to happen in threes, and God wasn’t quite done with my lesson yet.
Act Three: Tyres, Tuxedos, and Kindness
The day before I flew back to Australia, I hired a car to drive from Nashville to Clarksville to watch my friend Savannah Miles compete for Miss Georgia USA. Everything was going swimmingly — Savannah looked amazing, I bumped into her mom who had seen all the interviews I’d done with Savannah over the last seven years, and I even managed to bump into Isabella Bloedorn, another former Miss Georgia Teen USA who I’d interviewed a couple of years back.
But then I needed to make the short drive to the after-party, and I don’t know about you, but the hardest thing about driving on the wrong side of the road is not the driving — it’s the parking. The turning, the reversing, all those low-speed manoeuvres. In any case, I eventually found a place to park, but completely misjudged how much space I had as I was pulling in and hit the kerb. Hard. Like really hard. Warning lights went off, and I heard a strange deflating sound.
Yep, I’d managed to pull the tyre right off the wheel.
I exited the car to take a look, and I immediately knew I was either going to have to call roadside assistance or change the tyre myself. At first I tried calling, but it was one of those automated services, and for some reason, it would disconnect every time I was telling it what the problem was. I had a brief and unsuccessful look around for a public phone (do they even have those anymore?), before resigning myself to the fact I was going to have to change the tyre myself.
Did I mention I was in my tux? Also, did I mention it was raining? And that I was parked on a hill?
So there I am, on my knees in my dress pants and shirt, trying to find the jack point for my car, the rain making it impossible to see out of my glasses, and me wondering what I’d done to piss God off so much this trip. Then behind me, a woman’s voice asks me if I need help. I turn around, and it’s a homeless person, who turns out to be a former mechanic. In a few minutes, she’s helped me locate the jack point successfully, and we almost manage to get the car up when it rolls a couple of inches backwards and comes crashing down (I mentioned I was parked on a hill, right?).
Not missing a beat, she suggests I take the car just around the corner to an empty parking lot which is flat, has lots of space, and would be a perfect location to change the tyre. I ease the car gingerly to the lot, hearing the tyre flapping as I go, and as I get out of the car ready to begin my new life as the tuxedoed mechanic, a police car pulls up. My homeless friend had flagged him down, told him I needed help, and I kid you not, next thing I know he’s doing my tyre change for me. Turns out he’d also worked in an auto shop as a kid, but what really blew my mind was he not only offered to change my tyre, he offered me his phone, wet wipes to clean my greasy hands, and even gave me pointers to the nearest shop where I could get the spare tyre’s air pressure checked. I was honestly so moved I could have cried.
Another long story short — I made the after-party, got to catch up with Savannah, had a great chat with Isabella and her mom, and Savannah even ended up winning the title of Miss Georgia USA. Plus, the flat tyre didn’t cost me a cent because it was covered by the insurance I’d purchased.
One door closes. Another opens.
Conclusion: Eat. Pray. Pageant.
To say that my trip to the US didn’t turn out as expected would hardly be doing it justice. I’ve never had such a strong sense that life was happening FOR me, and not just TO me. I’ve never had such a strong sense of surrender and patience, where something ‘negative’ would happen, yet I knew it would make perfect sense later on. I learnt patience. I learnt humility. I learnt to be less judgmental and more grateful.
Pageantry, for many of you, will be as much of a rollercoaster as my trip. There will be highs, there will be lows, but more than that, there will be things that happen and you’ll be wondering ‘why’ or ‘why me’? And at times it can be really hard to keep going, because it can feel like God or the Universe just keeps punching you in the face.
But that’s where I hope you have your "Eat. Pray. Pageant." moment too, showing you that sometimes a setback or a challenge is simply a test, not a denial. Hopefully you won’t have to be changing a tyre in the rain in a tuxedo, but you’re probably a lot less stubborn than me… right?
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