Planes, Planes, and Automobiles

Neither Holly nor I travel by air all that often. So our "adventures" on Friday seemed like a movie to us, but are probably not that out-of-the-ordinary.

After a grueling car trip from Crystal Mountain to Lansing through freezing rain and sleet on Thursday, we began our day flying out of Lansing for Chicago O'Hare. Because of snow in Lansing our flight was delayed 1-1/2 hours. And that's where all the trouble started...

With the delay in Lansing, we arrived late in Chicago, narrowly missing our flight to Albuquerque. Along with most other folks on our flight, we needed to reschedule. Picture here loooong lines at the United customer service desk.

We finally got through customer service and were rescheduled through Denver later that afternoon, with a flight from Denver to Albuquerque that evening.

Our next delay occured on the Denver flight. The 747's 3rd engine wouldn't start so the plane had to come back to the gate for refueling and to have the engine manually started. A three hour delay. As crazy as it was, we had several nice parts to the Chicago-Denver trip. The 747 was spacious and we were bumped up to Business Class due to the seat availability. Wow -- what lovely leg room! And the staff was exceptionally friendly and helpful.

We arrived in Denver about 35 minutes after our next flight was scheduled to depart. We were sure we'd be spending the night in Denver and hoped our talks could be rescheduled to accommodate the delay. But we finally caught our first break of the day! Our flight had been delayed due to the fact that the First Officer was on the Chicago-Denver flight with us.

So we made the flight to Albuquerque after all and arrived at our hotel at about 12:30 am. A mere 12 hours after our scheduled arrival. What a long day!