We Can Laugh Now, Vol. I

Everyone has nightmare travel stories. Here's the first part of one of ours.

Ann and I were married in late June, 2009. About two weeks before the big day, we traveled to Tuscaloosa to find a place for our stuff. I think we knew already, but we learned once again that the shortest distance between two points isn’t always a straight line.

Our journey started from Kansas City—Lenexa, to be specific, where we spent the night with Ann’s mother. Our flight took off at 6:30, so we got an early start. I heard a thumping sound as we drove through the parking lot, but we paid it no attention. We didn’t have time, really. As we were boarding for our flight to Dallas, the gate attendant told us our flight from DFW was already delayed due to thunderstorms. Swell. But we figured it’d be an extra hour or two past our scheduled 11:00 am departure.

Boy, were we wrong about that one. They were already backed up with cancellations from storms the previous day, and the weather didn’t make things any easier. The terminal was filling up with stranded travelers and started to look like the news video you always see in winter. 11 am became 1:30, became 2:00, became 4:00, and so on. The original plan had us in Tuscaloosa about 2 pm for some house hunting, so the plan changed a lot, and in a big hurry.

Eventually we got in the ticket line, and after a few hours (everyone else had the same idea), we found out the earliest flight we could get was 36 hours away. Faced with the possibility of spending two nights in an airport, we called an audible. So we got on the phone with the airline’s travel agency and booked a car one way, and got out on I-20 about 6:00. Our stuff was booked through Birmingham, so all we had was our carry-on bags, so we stopped at a Wal-Mart for toothbrushes and underwear, sat down for really fast food, and got on our way, arriving at our motel in Shreveport at about 11:00 pm. We were on the highway talking to the same airline travel agency, so they have no idea the dump they’ve put us in. We didn’t even want to go back downstairs for a beer to help us unwind. We’d been up since 4:30 and went to bed and sleep almost immediately, hoping the voices on the other side of the wall would soon go away, and that there would be no gunfire.