I was supposed to fly out of Charleston to return home from seeing Wes on May 20th. It was a pretty well set up flight for a non morning person such as myself. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30 pm, about an hour and a half in Atlanta, arriving home at about midnight. So, it would have been a late night, especially to get up and go to work after being off for a week the next morning, but it was either that or leave at 6:30 am, which just would have been bad. Not to mention next to impossible. The likely hood of getting both Wes and myself out the door at that hour is beyond slim.
As we were driving to the airport, an eerie sound started to give me reservations about my flight. For those of you who've experienced spring in the south, you know what the tone over the radio means. Yep, tornado warning. Funny thing is, the sky at the time was perfectly clear. But, we went on to the airport, the warning did not include Charleston County as of yet. I got checked in and headed for security after we said our goodbyes. The weather was making Wes a bit nervous, so he started heading home instead of waiting until my plane actually took off, as was his routine.
When I got to my gate, they were announcing that they needed us to board as quickly as possible once the plane was unloaded so we could get out ahead of the weather. I think we all did a fairly good job, but not good enough. We started to pull away from the gate, the flight attendants started their safety spiel, and we all thought we would be airborne in a matter of minutes. Not so much. We stopped backing up, then the pilot came on the loudspeaker and informed us we had to stay right where we were, there was lightning above us, so we had to wait it out, but that we were perfectly safe on the plane. I bought that as far as lightning was concerned, but what about the tornado warning?
Well, I was right for thinking that. A few minutes later, we pulled back to the gate and were asked to deplane quickly and once in the terminal, stay clear of the windows. YAY!!!!! I've been through this before. A tornado took out downtown Clarksville, TN when we lived there. So, we're back in the terminal, packed into this kind of vestibule. I gave Wes a call to let him know. He could barely hear me through the rain. He was going 20 mph down a major highway and could barely see. He wanted to get off the road, but couldn't even see the parking lots of the businesses he was passing. He opted to head for his grandma's house which was closer than his own.
Meanwhile, back at CHS, the weather keeps updating, but no one is leaving. People start slowly going back into the main terminal, still not sitting near the windows, but not feeling the need to be against the brick walls of the vestibule anymore. Then, another flight announed reboarding. Well, what about my flight??? A few minutes later, our pilot comes on the intercom to tell us, that yes, they are getting a couple of flights out, but not ours. There is another storm system coming through. He also let us know that as we had been deplaning, the air traffic control tower could see the swirling clouds right above us. It never touched ground, but it was "that" close. Ok, phew, we're relieved. When can we leave? Well he tries to make us all feel better about possibly missing connections in Atlanta because, well, Atlanta is now closed too.
Atlanta/McCarran is one of the busiest airports in the world. If it shuts down for even 30 minutes, it puts it hours behind schedule. So, best case scenarion, I leave Atlanta before midnight, make it home sometime around dawn. Meanwhile spending hours upon hours in one airport or another. That is when I surrendered. I called family and let them know the situation, then marched myself up to the counter and changed my flight to the next day. My bag was irretrievable, but at least I was going to sleep in a bed that night.
.
My choices for leaving the next day included the 6:30 am flight again, or leaving at noon with a 4 hour layover in Atlanta. I chose the layover. Wes had to work, but his sister was nice enough to drop me at the airport. I spent my 4 long hours in Atlanta, had an awesome sandwich from the Atlanta Bread Company, played a lot of Sudoku, and got very acquainted with my playlist on my MP3 player. But, my flight left on time, and I did make it home. My bag was waiting for me at the AirTran baggage office (I actually got it before bags from the flight started coming down), met my mom and dad outside, and made it home just in time to go to bed. At my regular bedtime even.
Just a couple of funny side notes. When planning the trip, Wes was trying to talk me into staying until Wednesday, but I didn't want to miss that many days of work. I guess he'd been onto something. And, here's some irony, Tuesday afternoon before I left (the first time) we'd been watching Twister on Encore. I think the Universe had something to tell me. Good thing it finally made me listen!
No comments:
Post a Comment