Getting Here

I hadn’t been through that much de-icing since Al Gore declared his inconvenient truth about global warming. The slushy substance oozed down the window, first a trickle and then a good sloshing like a glacier flow in spring, or during a cycle of thermal proliferation.

The first plane had been cancelled, an accidental discovery at 3 am when I went on the web to check airport and weather status. A click to the Delta website and there in bold letters – CANCEL, the flight from Albany to JFK. I figured such a thing would happen. Oh well, I’m flexible. It wasn’t like I had a hotel reservation and a six night window to cram an annual vacation into before I got back to a crunch job.

Before leaving the house for the airport I re-scheduled the trip to Maui through Cincinnati and Salt Lake City. And if all went well, we would arrive in the Aloha State four hours ahead of the original schedule. Looking out the window of the plane in the predawn and listening to the muffled splashes on the fuselage I held no hope of making a 30 minute connection. I resigned to spending one long day in some airport lounge, at best in a hotel room in the Blue Grass State. (Yes, the Cincinnati is in Kentucky.)

Cincinnati was covered in a combination of winter weather: sleet, snow and freezing rain under a white fog. Despite thinking we would never get out of there because we were late and bad weather, Dad and I made a quick trip from concourse to concourse. At the closed gate with a plane still on the jet way, the agent opened the door for us, the last of seven to make the flight from the Albany connection. Our seats had been given away and I expected our luggage would sit on the tarmac for a day and a half before catching up with us in Maui.

They wanted to check Dad's carry-on, but because it had all his medication, the attendants found space somewhere for it. I crammed into a middle seat next to a real white-knuckled flier who throughout the flight clutched the back of the seat and literally gasped when we hit the least amount of turbulance. It was a smooth flight and I felt sorry for the guy.

Salt Lake also experienced snow. Again, an OJ Simpson-like dash through the airport, concourse to concourse. We again found the plane waiting for us. If miracles of miracles got our luggage on the plane from Cincinnati, there couldn’t possibly be another miracle to get our luggage on this plane.

We sat near the bulkhead door and froze our asses off for six hours. The only consolation was that when the door opened, the blast of air on the other side would be 45 degrees above the freezing mark. Yeah, it was pouring rain but I wasn’t on vacation. I was in my home state, Hawaii. With my luggage!!

Delta is one of the few remaining airlines that doesn't charge for luggage, at least not the first bag going to Hawaii. (I checked their website to read the policy and because of the merge with Northwest it was too confusing to decipher. Well, not really, I was just too impatient to read it all.)

Good job Delta.