One-Liner Wednesday – Let’s Fly

In Monday’s post, I made the comment:

“If Delta and WordPress are both on time, I will have been asleep for about 4-5 hours by the time this post is published after returning home at dark o’clock on Monday.”

What I didn’t mention, because I don’t usually reveal travel plans in advance, was that I had to drive to Boston on Monday, so that whole being-on-time thing was important.

Well, WordPress was on time.

Delta? Delta had some issues.

At about 2:30 pm, Delta notified me that my 6:00 pm flight from Des Moines (DSM) that was to connect me to my 8:00 pm flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) to Hartford (BDL), wasn’t going to leave DSM until 7:34 pm.

It’s a short hop, but not that short.

Delta is amazing when things go wrong, but this time, mainly due to the late hour at which I was scheduled to head home, there weren’t many options. The alternate flights they were suggesting, were either too complicated (multiple connections), too soon (I couldn’t get to DSM in time), or were going to require too many hours of travel and put me home much later. As I was muttering about the options, my brother said:

“I can get you to Minneapolis for that 8:00 flight.”

Seriously?

It was almost 3:00 pm. We still had to stop to see my mom – couldn’t leave Iowa without giving her a hug – and she lives 15 minutes in the opposite direction of MSP, and getting there for an 8:00 flight means 6:30-ish. We stepped into high gear. My niece packed up my mom’s dinner. I packed up my electronic gizmos, my brother looked for some good driving music – hey, some things are important – and we were off.

A Delta representative called me as we were pulling into my mom’s apartment building’s parking lot. The representative worked the issue offline while I said goodbye to my mom (universal understanding of that requirement) and by the time I was back in my brother’s car, she confirmed the fact that our plan was our best option.

Iowa-Brother-Airlines was cleared for take-off. Flying Driving Flying-low time to MSP, just under three hours.

Note: if you ever find yourself in the situation where you are going to miss the first leg of a multi-city flight, you NEED to speak with a representative. Mine kept me on the line for about 20 minutes while she worked to make sure that my seat on the flight from MSP-to-BDL wasn’t going to be put back on the open market after I didn’t board the DSM-to-MSP flight.

For the second time in two weeks, I was at Gate-D3 in MSP, waiting for an 8:00 flight to Hartford.

My brother stopped for dinner on his drive home. Ironically, he texted me that he arrived home, a few seconds after we touched down at BDL.

Sometimes, people step up when most needed – Thanks Bro!

This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s fun and challenging weekly series One-Liner Wednesday. Challenging because I can’t seem to stick to one line. The gallery includes some of the pictures I took as we drove through the rain to MSP. I managed to get some interesting doors-at-a-distance shots, but I’ll save them for a few weeks.

A lot of these big empty fields had a lone bare tree standing in the middle.

I just couldn’t stop

Birds! This huge swarm of birds flew across the highway, spread out and filled these trees.

The scale of these farms is just amazing.

I’m not sure what’s going on in the center, but it’s pretty cool.

Thanks for taking one for the team guy :-)

OK, that car is going really, really slow. So slow. Slowest car ever. We are not speeding.

You just don’t see stuff like this in Connecticut

I’d like to step inside all of those

A crane building a windmill. Yeah, who didn’t know I’d be taking a picture of that?

This is what I think about when people say “farm”

This looks like something I’d expect to see in a Star Trek episode. I’m pretty sure spaceship-smashing beams come out of the top.

No, we did NOT stop.

Owantonna Regional Airport. Not my destination but I wouldn’t mind flying home in one of those.

Pit stop

My east coast friends might snicker, but that’s a ski area.

It’s like when Dorothy and the crew saw OZ.