I know that travel horror stories are legion but I have usually been lucky enough to not be caught in them.  However, it was apparently our turn. We had been looking forward to our trip to Vermont to visit Jesse for some time – me especially so since I hadn’t seen my daughter since July.  We paid stoopid money for the plane tickets because it is the beginning of leaf peeping season even though that isn’t why we were going.  We had plans for hanging out in town, eating well, watching Jesse play rugby, and just generally enjoying some family time.  Then some idiot has to set something on fire in Chicago and that starts the dominos.  Our flights were on United which seemed to be particularly hard hit by the air traffic control mess in Chicago and the first domino fell when they cancelled our flight to Chicago on Thursday night.

Fine.  That wasn’t so bad since it was going to get us into Burlington after midnight and really put us in a bind to get ready (since I had just come back from a business trip on Tuesday) so we looked on the bright side:  we got to watch the Packers crush the Vikings and catch some of the Royals win – both of which we would have missed in the air.  So we thought maybe the 8am flight out on Friday morning wasn’t such a bad thing.  It would get us into Burlington around 2:30 – right when Jesse got out of class.  Okay, we’ll manage.

Except when we woke up Friday morning, our 8am flight was delayed until 9:20 because of a delayed flight crew.  Apparently they had gotten in late the night before and they couldn’t take off again until after the mandated FAA rest period.  Okay, we had been scheduled for a long layover in Chicago and now we would just get off one plane and straight on the next.  We had about 35 minutes and were landing and taking off from the same terminal so it didn’t seem too bad.  We had a nice breakfast and got to the airport and got all checked in plenty early for the 9:24 scheduled departure time.

Domino two:  no departure.  Plane was there, passengers were there, flight attendant there.  No cockpit crew.  At about 9am, the gate agent announced that the crew was somewhere in the airport and they were trying to locate them and as long as we could get wheels up by 9:30, we’d still land in Chicago in time for people to make connections.  Really?  Lost in the Kansas City airport?  Have you been there?  It’s not that big!  Now I begin to worry about boarding a plane with an idiot in the cockpit.

Which I shouldn’t have worried about.  When we hit 9:30, the plane was officially delayed until 10am while they looked for an alternative crew (WTF?  Where did the first crew go?) and we were now going to miss our connection.  The next flight to Burlington was on Saturday so we’d be stuck in Chicago for the day then fly to VT to land 24 hours before departing again.  Nope, not worth the kind of money I paid for the tickets.  By now,  I couldn’t find any other way to get to Burlington before Saturday at any cost so there was no other option:  cancel the whole trip.  The gate agent started the process of refunding our money – no arguments at least.  This one couldn’t be blamed on weather, air traffic control or any other outside force:  the airline HAD LOST THE FLIGHT CREW.  So United, you now have also lost a fairly frequent flyer.  We headed home.

Domino three: in the rain.  The weather hadn’t improved and a cold, stinging rain started as we pulled out of the parking lot.  We headed home, shed a few tears of disappointment along the way, finished the refund request on-line and both headed to work.  Where we had to explain 100 times why we were there.  We could have stayed home since we had taken the day off but Frank wouldn’t have gotten paid and I would have been left alone in a house with no food – because we thought we were going to be gone for three days! So off to work and while I like my new job, I wasn’t supposed to be there so it wasn’t any fun.

[Skipping over the Friday evening frustration of trying to finish a research project at home only to have my password expire in the middle of all my work and then being locked out, having to email the boss begging to be unlocked only to have all my stuff crash. We’ll focus on the Royals win instead.]

So now we are home when we aren’t supposed to be.  Got to run some errands that would have been over due and tried to find a bright spot in prowling around the West Bottoms antinque-ing for First Friday weekend – if you haven’t been here for that, you really should come! But our quest for some stained glass for the front window was for naught and after two hours of prowling through old warehouses, it was time to give up.  We did score some great vinyl (nearly new copy of “Born to Run” for example) but it didn’t feel like a victory.  We still had to go food shopping and had planned on more comfort food for the evening meal:  corned beef and cabbage!  Domino four: Three grocery stores later, and still no corned beef.  We finally find it at McGonigle’s butcher shop but when you start cooking your corned beef at 6:30pm, you are bound to be disappointed or eating at midnight.  And we were pretty much both.

So now I sit on a sunny Sunday morning, still fighting with my research project, waiting to wake Frank it’s past time to get up. (I can’t sleep past 7am no matter how hard I try).  No run for me because my old lady feet are still protesting. No church today because we still don’t have warm fuzzies for the local chapel.  But I do get to look forward to scrubbing the bathrooms. Oh joy. Pinch me – I must be dreaming. I’ll look forward to cooking more comfort food (stew and home made bread – made with plenty of time to spare today) and hope that the Royals win tonight so that maybe I can be cheered up by the joy around me.