ugh. i cancelled the last leg of my trip due to
catching a nasty head cold during my trip. so instead of going to
l.a., i came home last night from minneapolis. i’m sure everyone on
my flight was super happy to have a sniffly, sneezing, hacking,
nose-blowing guy on their flight.

on top of getting a cold, i think this trip could qualify for the
Most Number of Aggravating Delays and Mishaps award. i won’t bore
you with all the details, but here’ a peak at how unsmoothly things
went; it started with an hour delay at
o’hare

followed by a circling
logan

for an hour due to the airport being shutdown on account of a
snowstorm. after circling and circling and circling, it was decided
that it was time for an emergency diversion to the
hartford
bradley international airport

in hartford, connecticut, since we were running low on fuel and it
wasn’t entirely clear when
logan

was going to reopen for business. the captain made it clear that he
was leaning towards dumping us off at harford and either putting us
up in a hotel or getting a bus to boston. at this point, it’s
around 9 p.m. EST and i’ve already got 4.5 hours of travel time
invested in trying to get from grand rapids to boston.

but alas, it looks like all the planes that landed before us have
depleted harford of all its busses, rental cars and hotel rooms so
there’s no room for another plane load of people. i don’t know if
that’s good news or bad news. i do know that it has taken 2 hours to
come to that conclusion, since we are updated of the problem at
about 11 p.m. EST.

in case you’re wondering, they never did let us off the plane.

so we’re going back to boston, which means that the plane needs to
be de-iced and refueled. naturally, one of the de-icers runs out of
de-icing fluid because they didn’t plan to de-ice so many planes.
of course, the other de-icer gets a clogged nozzle. de-icing takes
a long time. we finally take off around 12:00 a.m. EST and land in
boston at 12:30 a.m. EST, which means it took about 8 hours to get
from grand rapids to boston.

as i sit in the shuttle to the hotel, i notice that my head feels
funny and hope that i haven’t caught a cold.