Bloomsday organizer ‘feeling lucky’ after returning to Spokane from Qatar, where he was stranded amid Iran conflict

Doug Kelley was biding his time in his hotel room in Doha, Qatar, when the 1971 Clint Eastwood flick “Dirty Harry” came on.

The television in the area, which Kelley got an in-depth look at during his more than 10-day layover in the Middle East, “leaves a little bit to be desired,” he said. The film was a welcome respite. It also carries an iconic line that rattled around his brain for days as he awaited a way out of the country amid the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.

“You’ve got to ask yourself one question; ‘Do I feel lucky?’ ” Eastwood’s character says. “Well, do you, punk?”

Kelley said he started to reflect. The former Bloomsday race director and longtime Avista employee expected to only stay a day in the country as a layover from a trip to Tanzania and Zanzibar in late February when the fighting began.

“And that scene comes across, and I’m going, ‘You know, actually, I do feel kind of lucky at this point, under the circumstances,’ ” Kelley said.

He arrived back in Spokane in the early hours of Thursday morning after catching an extradition flight organized by the U.S. State Department to Athens, Greece, where he made his own arrangements to get back to Spokane. The initial flight was about half full, consisting mostly of families with children, he said.

Doha, as well as Abu Dhabi and Dubai, both in the neighboring nation of the United Arab Emirates, serve as key transportation hubs, with Dubai International seeing a record 95.2 million travelers in 2025, making it the busiest airport in the world. The cancellation of most flights that halted travel throughout the Middle East following the attack left Kelley and several thousand tourists and travelers stranded with few options.

Kelley felt lucky because his hotel, where he passed time watching classic movies and connecting with old friends, was away from the airport and downtown Doha, which both could have become targets. He pointed to Iran’s recent drone strikes targeting Dubai International as an example.

Doha is a beautiful city, where modern skyscapers are intermingled with historic, ornamental structures, Kelley said. The majority Sunni-Muslim country of Qatar gained its independence from Great Britain in 1971, but the new country is rapidly growing.

It was Kelley’s third time visiting Doha, and he said it was a bit shocking to see streets empty, shops closed and life halted as shelter-in-place orders were routinely sent out. Life started to get back to a semblance of normalcy about four days after the initial attack, he said, as it wasn’t the first time locals had experienced such a thing.

“It just so happened to be Ramadan when I was there, which is a time of fasting and no alcohol,” Kelley said. “Which, to an extent, it was probably good that there was no alcohol for me. That could have been more negative than positive.”

Kelley said he heard explosions in the sky above him around three times a day, including in the early hours of each morning. He started going for walks a few days in to “keep his sanity,” but the hundreds of messages he received from old friends and constant conversations with his wife, Trish Nicholls, did more to that effect.

Kelley said the extended stay in Qatar, and uncertainty of how he would return to Spokane, was hard for his wife. For himself, it was a lesson in the importance of community and the ways in which he copes with stress.

“In the absence of actual information, you tend to make up your own things in your mind; it’s pretty easy, the way the news is,” Kelley said. “We had some low points, so we tried to keep each other right, to do what we could to support each other, and had a few very close friends who were so wonderful and cared a lot to help get through this.”

Kelley said he reconnected with friends he hadn’t heard from in years, and their care helped him keep some levity during the harrowing experience. He’s now glad to be back in the company of his wife and their golden retriever Wally, and posed with the two for a photo shared to social media Thursday outside his front door. He sported an “I Heart Qatar” T-shirt.

As for those still stuck in the region, Kelley advised their loved ones to stay in contact.

“There’s still a lot of people in harm’s way, a lot of people over there,” Kelley said. “And boy, if people know any of them are or have any contacts, it’s just so important to just send messages and communicate with people, because it makes a world of difference.”