Then the long trip home- Friday to Saturday, July 14-15, 2017

     Our tickets for our flight home were on United, which did send up some red-flags, especially after the airlines made the news for dragging a passenger off their plane several weeks ago.  But we already had our tickets before that incident, so we continued with the plan.  Julie's folks are still driving our car back.  They were in Bismark, ND, on Thursday night, and went to Mall of America on Friday.

      Our flight was supposed to leave around noon, Pacific time, which seemed to give us a comfortable morning start.  That part of the day got even more leisurely when we received notice that our flight was rescheduled, and was to leave Seattle at 3:13, Pacific.   The reason given, several times, was that the flight crew had only arrived in Seattle at 4:00 AM and needed time to rest.  What that really means is that somebody in their management doesn't know how to schedule flight crews.  When we checked in at the airport, we noticed that we would only have seven minutes to switch planes in Chicago.  When we talked to the United staff, they were concerned because apparently every flight from Chicago to Buffalo for the next two days is packed full.  As we were talking to them, we received a text notice that the flight in from O'Hare to Buffalo was rescheduled, which gave us slightly more breathing room.

     The flight from Sea-Tac to O'Hare was relatively uneventful, but we when we taxied into O'Hare, there was apparently one plane sitting where it wasn't supposed to be, and it was blocking six gates- one of them, ours.  It didn't take too terribly long to fix this, but it did seem unusual, even to the pilot, and it was costing us precious minutes that we needed to make the connection.  We were ready to run to the next gate as soon as we got off, and were somewhat relieved to see that the flight to Buffalo had been delayed once again.  That gave us a chance to grab a dinner (although the food places were closing, and didn't seem anxious to serve us.  "We're closing in less than 30 minutes," we were told by one, but eventually we bought the pizzas that they had already made there anyway).   The real concern was that there was no plane sitting at the gate, and for the rest of the night there was not going to be.  Eventually, United outright cancelled the flight, and while we didn't know why then it certainly appeared to be managerial incompetence.

     This is when things got frustrating.  We couldn't quite hear the announcement when it was first made, and by the time we read the boards and figured out what was going on, the entire planeload of passengers had basically formed a long line of angry, frustrated customers in front of us.  We knew from Seattle that there wasn't going to be room for any people on the planes to Buffalo for a while, much less an entire plane full.    The line didn't seem to be moving at all and we made use of cellphones to call Enterprise to rent a car.  We received some assurances that our bags would make it to Buffalo, and so we headed out for the last long drive of our trip- the nine hour drive to Buffalo.

     Surprisingly, we were all in good spirits about it and were joking that we didn't expect to see Chicago again so soon as we drove around the Loop and saw buildings we had come to be familiar with.  Emma (jokingly) said she wanted to do a long ride like this every day.   Other than being really tired, the drive was relatively uneventful, but we did save receipts from all the tolls and gas to turn in to United.  Instead of getting home after 1:00 AM, we arrived back at our house at 10:00 AM on Saturday.

       We were supposed to pick up the dogs at about that time.  We don't know who was more excited to be back together-- Anna or the dogs.  At the time of this writing,  Julie and Anna have gotten the rental car returned (we weren't the first to have driven straight from Chicago from the cancelled flight) and brought back Mighty Taco for lunch.  They also got one bag from the airlines- Emma's.  There were fifty or more bags waiting for owners there, and no doubt more still en route.  We have two more that are supposed to be delivered to us when they arrive on later flights.