( My friends on Facebook know this story already but I’m posting it anyway. ) So following up my last entry, I went to the Cleveland Airport about an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes before my flight was supposed to leave expecting to find mass hysteria since the power had only recently been turned back on. Much to my surprise I found the place to be almost completely empty. There was no one in line for security so I breezed through. ( It was easy enough to remember the process I had followed at O’Hare only the day before. ) There was no one waiting around most of the gates. Almost everything was closed. At this point I was thinking “okay my flight is still listed as on time, so I just have a while to kill.” No sooner had I sat down and started loading up a movie on my laptop, and my phone buzzes. Somehow I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. Text message, Orbitz, flight delayed by 20 minutes. “Whew” I thought, 20 minutes is nothing. Back to the movie. Jump ahead about 30 minutes or so. Another text, flight now delayed by over an hour. I start to think “this isn’t looking good for getting out tonight.” Another reasonably small chunk of time later, I see several people around me start getting up to look at the flight board. “What fresh hell is this?” I say to myself. Flight board indicates that we should see the agent at the desk to be switched to a different flight that is now leaving earlier than ours. As I wait in line I begin to wonder how we will fit two planes worth of people into one plane. Fortunately when I get to the counter I get a reserved seat for the other flight, NOT a stand-by ticket. As it turned out the plane we were moved to was MUCH larger than the one we were originally supposed to be on. We boarded on time, and after de-icing the plane I had a very pleasant flight back to O’Hare. We had to wait a decent amount of time for our gate to clear, adding to the overall lateness of me getting home, but I was just glad to be there. Overall the weekend should have been more fun for me than it was, and I’ll explain why in my next post.

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