This morning I woke up at dawn’s cranky old crack to prepare for the first leg of my flight to the land of the Queen. 4am – dressed and wide awake, I decide to check online for the flight status 5 minutes before my favourite cab driver plans to collect me – and discover the entire flight, from stripping to the essentials at the gates to the part where you squeeze between new intimate friends… has been “CANCELLED”!!! No reason given. No alternatives mentioned. PANIC!!!!<\/p>\n
A few fanny-flapping calls and some long waits later I find out that United Airlines has already booked me on a later flight late this evening to Heathrow via Chicago and pushing my arrival into the next am. Boo. I anticipate the jetlag and go back to bed, grumpy and already hating the journey ahead.<\/p>\n
A good hour after I’d woken up for the second time this morning, with the idea that I would treat myself to some hot chocolate with whipped cream a bit later and with some homemade scrambled eggs in my belly, the boys return home, frozen and despondent because no school bus came for them. Again. At first I scoffed to myself about how this was a sign that this day was only going to get more complicated and annoying… but later began to dawn on me how fantastic it was that I’d get to spend one more day with my babies (the oldest was feeling very sorry for himself as he had planned a day’s work over steamy coffees at Crazy Mocha, but he lay back on the couch with his laptop while I enclosed his icy wet feet in lambskin slippers and those feelings soon melted away. The youngest built himself a fort out of blankets and our clothes drying rack, and spent the day giving us grand tours of the different styles of forts he could fashion out of 4 blankets. I tried my best to notice the differences between each style. And I get back to the point…) I check the website again and NOOOO – the flight to Chicago this evening is “in flight control”! I quickly Google the phrase to find out what it means and discover that the flight will amost definitely be delayed, which almost definitely guarantees I will miss my main connecting flight to Heathrow. Gahhhh! More annoyance. I quickly shower and repack the bags that have bloated themselves across the livingroom floor, and catch the cab to Pittsburgh International in a hurry.<\/p>\n
Half an hour or so in the queue I finally get to the desk where I explain my sorry situation and how I would like to be put on a waiting list for the next flight into Chicago. A Scottish guy behind me talks loudly on his cellphone about how he is going to try to find another route because he is always getting stuck in Chicago overnight when it snows, and how the last time, the plane turned around and took them all back to Pittsburgh because it was so icy they couldnt even land. My heart sank. Even if I manage to get on this packed flight at the last minute, if they take me back to Pittsburgh I will definitely miss the one flight I’m guaranteed a seat on for later this evening. I stopped and considered my options. I eventually realised that as much as I was trying to control the situation, I was so misguided to believe I could change anything at all. No amount of bitching or ranting was going to help the situation. My baggage was already booked through to London on this standby flight I may never get on. I took a deep breath and for the first time completely embraced a notion that I have always wanted to believe in but could never quite succumb to — whatever happens, I am going to go along with it and I’m going to enjoy the journey… maybe even as much as the destination. If that means sleeping over at Ohare Airport with my coat for a blanket and my laptop bag as a pillow, that would be part of the adventure.<\/p>\n
So here I am, with a miraculous standby flight behind me, an hour before departing for the main leg of this solo adventure across the ocean, and I’m already hearing the doubters speaking of ice on the ramp and overnight delays… and the dreaded CANCELLED flights. But I’m feeling positive. I know that if the flight doesn’t leave tonight I have a scratchy thick woolen coat to keep me warm, a cell phone with 3 bars of juice, a tummy full of one large frozen margherita and the distant memory of nabbing that window seat earlier, the one everyone else looked longingly at but didnt dare to ask for… the one right next to two other empty seats… the only empty seats on the whole flight. A whole row of watch the sunset and laid back glory. Yep. I was the one who got it! All I did was ask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I woke up at dawn’s cranky old crack to prepare for the first leg of my flight to the land of the Queen. 4am – dressed and wide awake, I decide to check online for the flight status 5 minutes before my favourite cab driver plans to collect me – and discover the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogalog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}