Dear Constant Reader,
I make careful plans. My careful plan for my trip to New Mexico was to take a red-eye flight Monday night back to Boston, arriving Tuesday before dawn, but after the T had started running for the day. I had to make a connection in Phoenix, but a tedious layover had become a lovely opportunity for a visit with a dear friend.
My careful plan did not include Snowstorm Stella and airlines being jerks. Despite the fact that my flight, as scheduled, would have arrived before the snow was supposed to start, the airline canceled it. After spending an enormous amount of time on hold, a very sympathetic person did her best to get me home as soon as possible. I was now flying Tuesday morning Albuquerque-Dallas-Charlotte-Providence, arriving in Rhode Island around 10PM. Not ideal, but I would cope. Scratch agreed to pick me up at the airport.
Then they canceled the Charlotte-Providence flight and told me I couldn’t get a flight out of Charlotte until Thursday night. Thinking quickly, I asked them to get me from Albuquerque to Florida, where my parents are. At least, if I was going to be stuck somewhere for a couple of days, it wasn’t going to be a hotel in a strange city. Again, the earliest I could get to New England was Providence on Thursday around 10pm.
For those of you who aren’t from my neck of the woods, the Providence airport (really in Warwick) is more than an hour from The Manor and I’d have to take a bus to the city of Providence proper to *maybe* catch the last train to Boston and then *maybe* catch the last subway to my house. Why am I worrying about public transit when I just said that Scratch was willing to pick me up on Tuesday? Because by the time I landed in Rhode Island on Thursday, he would have been on a plane for several hours heading to Hungary.
Dr. Jen, my heroic hostess, lives in the mountains an hour and a half from Albuquerque. She and Wallace (her adorable French bulldog) were up at 4AM to drive me to the airport. That was truly above and beyond.
By the time I landed in Florida, ready for two days of sun (and acquiring some clean clothes), Scratch had found me a flight on Wednesday which arrived in Providence (still nothing to Boston). The only hitch was that I needed to catch the first flight of the day to Atlanta, which required my father and I getting up at 2:30AM. So it was but a brief hiatus of enjoying my mother’s heirloom-recipe meatloaf and playing with G.G., the shy ragdoll cat, before I passed out cold.
At godawful early my doting father drove me to the airport and despite having to wait for security to open for the day, it was an uneventful trip to Atlanta. You know you’re tired when you sleep for over an hour on the floor of an airport terminal. Even though the snow storm had long ended, I was positive my flight to Providence was going to be canceled until I was actually on the plane.
After six states and two days I was finally home. I was so grateful that I proceeded to sleep for the rest of the day.
