What do you mean, what is the UFL Airline? You most likely have flown it, only it claimed a different name so you wouldn't figure it out. But when you see what UFL means, you'll recognize both the airline and the flight or flights you took.

UFL, as anyone without knowledge of actual airline names may know, is the U Fly Late Airline.

Now do you recognize it?

Nicki -- that may be her name or may not, since I'm not good at names so can't really remember -- flew on this airline to the Philippines to visit relatives. It took her three days.

Three days? That's how long we're planning our trip to North Carolina to take. And we're driving. We certainly wouldn't want to fly for three days and then end up in North Carolina, or the Philippines, for that matter.

I measured the distance from Maine to the Philippines on the globe. It's not all that far. Three days to go partly around the globe?

Nicki's realization of actual flying as opposed to advertised flying came in a series of long, slow periods of seeing the light. She saw the light several times. Actually, she saw it each time she was to transfer to another flight.

Each flight was late arriving, causing her to miss her connection, causing her to sit in an airport or somewhere for up to 12 hours waiting for the next flight to where her connection was supposed to be heading.

Of course, as in all airlines, Nicki's luggage was lost, so once she arrived in the Philippines, she had to "camp" with the few items in her carryon bag. Toothbrushes are available in the Philippines, so that was no problem. Everything else was until the UFL Airline finally got her luggage to her.

Her stay was pleasant, except a woman used to Maine's spring temperatures of 40 degrees and early summer's of 70 or so found herself a bit uncomfortable with the 90-105 degrees offered by the islands. When I first saw her after her return a week or so ago, she was shivering. She still is.

On her return flight, she brought Philippine "goodies" to nibble and share with those she'd left at home. However airport security personnel relieved her of that for security reasons. Who knows, she may have had a bomb in those "goodies." Or, the airport security personnel may have been hungry. At any rate, she arrived back in Maine "goodiless."

Right at the last stage of her flight, when she landed in Philadelphia, Nicki was really looking forward to being home in Maine -- kissing the ground at Bangor International Airport and all that traditional homecoming stuff. But she was told she had been bumped from her flight and rescheduled.

She would be given an overnight stay in Philadelphia. Hey, just what any homesick Maineiac wants -- having to stay overnight in Philadelphia. There was nothing to remind her of home. Even the mosquitoes had become extinct due to that great Philadelphia pollution, the Schuylkill Expressway -- known to those who know it best and hate it most as the Surekill Crawlway -- and other forms of pollutants.

Exhausted and frustrated, Nicki asked how they could do this to her, since her flight had been booked a couple of months in advance.

"Because we're allowed to," came the answer.

I remember many years ago returning to Pennsylvania for a year to take a few college courses. I had looked forward to seeing friends I hadn't seen for the five years I'd been in Maine. Oops, to see those friends required a six-month advance booking. Hey, friends are important, but six month's notice to see them.

And the trails. The ones I'd recalled were crowded, not only with frustrated suburbanites trying to get away from it all with all the other suburbanites, but with subdivisions that had sprung up on former farmland. In one case, a fence had been erected on both sides of the Horseshoe Trail that headed west from Valley Forge into the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Several years after that during a vacation with my parents outside Philadelphia and during a period in which I'd become frustrated with the legalistic and angry attitude of a church in which I had served as pastor and the greedy attitude of the publisher of a weekly newspaper at which I had been working as news editor and as one of the two reporters.

I actually thought -- oh, Lord, forgive me -- of staying there when I saw an ad for a reporter in suburban Philadelphia. I thought about it, for say, ten minutes, and my decision was made by a question that crossed my mind.

A cool seaside path through the woods on a warm summer day. Milt Gross photo.

I wondered how many moose there were in suburban Philadelphia those days? The negative answer brought me wheeling back to Maine with my wife and four bread snappers.

Life in Maine has been not been frustrating since that question leading to a major life decision.

It is understandable why Nicki was so frustrated at being bumped and forced to spend a night in Philadelphia -- center city Philadelphia. Because they were allowed to bump her.

Weren't any moose in or near the hotel, she reported to me.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2011