How I Spent My Saturday

So, yeah. We took the "scenic" route home. Between Manchester, New Hampshire and Salt Lake City we landed in no less than 4 cities. Why this madness? you might wonder.

Well, it began with a car accident. (Not mine. Not this time anyway) What should have been a leasurely hour-long drive to the airport took nearly twice as long because of a bottleneck at the site of a pileup that involved 4+ cars. That's right. The three of us (my grandpa chauffeured) spend at least half an hour in stop and go traffic on a two-lane highway. Which definitely involved more stopping than going. And which ended with me and Nathan standing in line waiting to go through security as I saw the listing for our plane change from boarding to departed.

Crap.

Well, nowhere to go but forward. After security decided my canned fruit cocktail was contraband and made Nathan mail his metal-credit-card-sized-pocket-tool back to himself, we went to Southwest's terminal and explained our plight. While they didn't bring the plane back for us, we also didn't have to buy new tickets or get evil looks cast our way for being annoying. What did happen is that we flew standby from 11 o'clock Saturday morning (eastern time) to 8 am the next day (central time). We finally flew out from Manchester at 3:30 and got all the way to Chicago. In New Hampshire they had told us that we'd have to camp out in Chicago until 9:30 Sunday morning. Being stuck in an airport for 15 hour without any friends or family nearby did not sound like my idea of fun, so I made friendly with the employee at the Chicago gate and asked if they could do any better for me (us).

And guess what? We got to hang out in Dallas for a few hours with Nathan's favouritest aunt and her boys. In my book that was definitely a positive twist on what had started out as a bad day.

So, we started out in New Hampshire, had a layover in Chicago, took a flight to Dallas (with a 'stop' in St Louis where some passengers got off and some more got on and the two of us stayed put), hung out in Texas for ten hours, and finally got to go on a plane to Utah - but not before another 'stop', this time in Alburquerque. I rather felt like a yo-yo. Up and down, up and down. And I experienced most of the seasons in a 24 hour period. Pleasant autumn weather in New England, a humid summer night in Texas (where it's always summer), topped off by Utah's first snow of the winter. I had good times on my trip back home, but I would have to say that the biggest adventure was coming home.

Oh, and our luggage made it home before we did :)