A Journey of 35,000 Miles Begins With a Single Cancelled Flight…..

The gods of travel are laughing at me. I often go on about how much I love travel, even the airport, even security, even other crabby travelers. Friday was a true test of that mettle. Arriving two hours preflight at MSP, it was obvious something was seriously amiss. The crowd was murmuring and scowling with heavy sighs, eye-rolling and frantic phoning. Then an agent got on the PA. Flights to Charlotte and Philadelphia had been cancelled. Something about weather. Something about no other flights today. Something about all hope being lost forever.

The good news…we are carrying paper tickets which make it easier to transfer to another airline. The bad news…we are carrying paper tickets – a big, fat stack of them, and agents tend look at these things and freak out. This agent, though I am sure he meant well, kept getting distracted if something shiny entered his peripherals. This situation would send over the edge. I was sure of it.

Then Channel 5 Eyewitness News showed up. “Tell me” the reporter pried. “How does it feel to be standing in an unmoving line for 2 hours?”

“Gee Sparky, it feels just like an ice-cream enema” would have been the appropriate response.

The better news is that Mike got on the phone almost immediately with an angel straight down from heaven. Her name is Andi, she is from the US Airways international rate desk, and folk songs will be written about her.

She found us another flight on American Airlines, leaving the next day, confirmed the seats, and then sat on the phone with Mike for the TWO HOURS it took for us to get to the front of the line. She wanted to make sure that the agent would know what to do with us, with this complicated trip, with this fat stack of handwritten, paper tickets. She is a Super Hero.

Extremely long story short – we stayed in Minneapolis that first night, and watched Mike’s interview on the 10 pm news with Sparky the Channel 5 Eyewitness News reporter. They cut the part about the ice cream.