This, That, and the Other

For his Writer’s Workshop this week, John Holton gives us six writing prompts and we are tasked with choosing one of the prompts (or as many as we want) and writing a post that addresses that (or those) prompt(s). I chose to use this prompt: Write about a time when the weather interfered with your plans.

My son and I embarked on a multi-state search for a college for him to go to. We lived in Massachusetts at the time, so we checked out Harvard, Amherst, UMass, Boston College, Boston University, and Tufts. We went on road trips to Rhode Island (Brown University) and to Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, and Haverford Colleges), to New Jersey (Princeton), and to Connecticut (Yale).

Then we flew west to visit the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, and two liberal arts colleges in Minnesota: Carleton and Macalester.

Everything was going smoothly in these visits until we attempted to fly from Chicago to St. Louis after visiting the University of Chicago. We got to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in plenty of time to make our one-hour flight to St. Louis. We even had time to grab a quick bite to eat before checking our baggage and going to the gate. The boarding process started on time and we boarded the plane and took our seats. The plane taxied from the gate and headed toward the runway for takeoff.

But then the plane changed direction and the captain came on the PA and announced that severe thunderstorms had formed in our flight path to St. Louis and the plane would be sitting in a holding area until the thunderstorms had passed. I looked at my watch and it was 7:15 pm.

We were still on the plane in the holding area at 9:30 pm when the captain fired up the plane’s engines and said that our flight path had cleared. But by 9:45 the plane hadn’t moved. Turned out that new thunderstorms had formed and we would continue to wait in in the holding area until they passed.

At 11:30 O’Hare was having severe thunderstorms directly overhead and the captain said that we were heading back to the terminal because the flight had been canceled. He said passengers would automatically be rebooked on a morning flight to St. Louis.

By the time everyone deplaned back in the terminal it was close to midnight. We were all directed to a large area where there were hundreds of folding cots set up. Small, almost flat pillows and very thin blankets were on each cot. Our luggage had been taken off the plane but it was locked for the night in a secure baggage area and no one could have access to their luggage.

Bottom line, my son and I had to spend the night on folding cots with flat pillows and thin blankets in a cold airport terminal building with maybe 150 other stranded passengers until morning. Needless to say, neither of us got much sleep that night.

But we did make it to St. Louis by around 11:00 the next morning and I was able to use my frequent flier miles to upgrade the two of us to first class for the flight. We were a bit late for our appointment to visit Washington University, but they were very accommodating. We even had time to go visit the famous St. Louis Arch before flying the next night to Minneapolis.

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Photo credit: sleeping in airports.net.