There would be advantages living in a place like Missoula. For one thing, when you turn in your rental car, you simply park it and give your key to a fellow inside the terminal. When you check in for your flight, there is no line and agent is willing to do everything for you. At TSA, there is no line and a friendly TSAgent. You look on the schedule board and you see there are about 8 flights leaving in the morning, and only eight gates. From your waiting chair, you watch other take offs.

I will abbreviate the rest. Our 12:34 flight left Missoula at approximately 5:40. First, there was a 2 hour delay because “all flights were grounded at O’Hare”, then another 2 hours because our crew was timed out and they had to get another crew into Missoula, and another 45 minutes because we missed our window to take off.

That meant we missed our connection to DC obviously and we weren’t going to get into O’Hare until after 9 and the only available dc flights would have got us to Dulles around midnight, so they automatically booked us on a 6 a.m. flight, which, with Michelle’s help from home (it was chaos trying to change anything in Missoula), we rebooked at 11:15. So we should be home at about 2:30 p.m. at National.

Of course, our bags are at O’Hare and we are pretty barebones here. We hope our bags are put on the 11:15 and not the 6 a.m., but we will find out when it is too late to do anything about that.

We are at the O’Hare Super 8 because we didn’t want to pay $400-$500, apparently a normal airport last minute rate, but the O’Hare Super 8 turns out to be 8 miles from the airport. United did not give anyone hotel vouchers because “the delay was  weather related”, but our taxi driver said there was no ground stop and the weather was fine.

More to come, I am sure.

P.S. Edie told me there were even more typos than usual. I am sure you understand. But I just corrected (most of) them.