Call me Odysseus

[resonant]

Did I have a vacation? I've forgotten all about it, because getting home from it took two days.

See, you can't get a direct flight to anywhere from here. So we normally have to change planes in Chicago or St. Louis. But when I was making our flight arrangements, all the Chicago and St. Louis flights on the 27th were at ungodly hours of the morning. So, hey, let's take a flight through a different city!

Like, say, Dallas!



So you know what was happening in Dallas on Wednesday, right? Lightning, flooding, and canceled flights, that's what.

At 10 p.m. on Wednesday -- at a time when we should have already been home, collapsing in exhaustion -- we were in Terminal B5 being told that our flight had been canceled. They could maybe get us on standby on a flight on Saturday. Or maybe we could get out earlier if we were willing to be on standby to fly in a couple of hours from home and drive from there.

In other words, the Dallas airport was a hermetically sealed bubble of despair. Nobody was getting a flight anywhere. We'd left the in-laws' house at 8:30 in the morning, and the kidlet was very weary, and we were all tired and slow.

So we got a rather stinky hotel room in Dallas, and in the morning we found a company that would do an interstate one-way car rental, and we drove 14 hours home.

Mysteriously, this morning when I went to the airport to drop off the car, I found that our luggage was right there behind the American Airlines ticket counter. Somehow they couldn't get the people home until Saturday but the luggage arrived the next day? Hm.

My conclusions?

- Airline travel? Hell.

- If you put Texas and Oklahoma in a bag and shook them until the money was evenly distributed, both states would be improved.

- Texas and Oklahoma are entirely too damned big. Missouri and Illinois could use some editing, too.

- After the first time, road-killed armadillos aren't really significantly more interesting than road-killed raccoons.

- There's a McDonald's every tenth of a mile until you're hungry and your kid is begging for familiar food, at which point they disappear and all you can find are creepy-smelling tiny buildings with "Flo's Eats!" shakily painted on the bricks.

- There is not a single decent radio station left in the middle of the country.

- Somebody must be patronizing those 'adult superstores' that line every freeway.

- The condom machines in truckstop bathrooms are ... eyecatching. I was glad I had already explained to the kidlet what a condom was. And rather cowardly glad that the display of light-up earrings right outside the bathroom distracted them before they could think to ask, "But then why did that one say, 'flavored'?"


While at the in-laws', I did finally get to meet makesmewannadie, who is very clever and funny (as you could guess from her posts) and also quite cute. Though it may be that I'm conditioned to find anybody cute if they're wearing a RayK bracelet. Somehow every time makesmewannadie and I are in the same state, she comes down with a stomach ailment, but I don't think she's yet traced the pattern to me.

edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hey, cool, I didn't know you were around there! But you wouldn't have wanted to make that drive -- I get that most of the flooding was further south than we were, but it was bad.

When we were sitting in the Dallas airport, slowly losing hope, I said to the spouse, "If I had my computer with me, I could make a LiveJournal post, and I'll bet I'd get four comments that said, 'Hey, we're right here, we'll give you a ride, you can sleep on our couch ...' " and he answered, " 'We'll cut your throats in the night ...' "

But the kidlet would be sorry to hear she'd missed a chance to play with a snake.