Home Again (for real!)

Soooooo, today was a very interesting day. According to my plan, I was going to be in Charleston, Illinois right now. But, . . . I am still in Orem, Utah--hooray!!! :-) I can't say I didn't try to get back to Illinois today, but it wasn't meant to be. Mom, Dad, and I left Orem this morning at about 6:00 and got up to the SLC airport by 7:00. I said my good-byes (which is hard for me), got all checked-in and went through the craziness known as the security check, found my gate, and was all set to go. It started dumping snow outside, and I asked the Southwest Airlines lady if our flight would be cancelled, and she said, "Oh, definitely not. We'll get out of here on time." Well, not so. At about 8:00 when I was supposed to start boarding, they announced that they were shutting the airport down for 45 minutes while they plowed the runways. I guess that the plane I was supposed to be on was coming from Boise and had to circle around while they plowed the runways. It started to run out of fuel, so it had to fly back to Boise to refuel, and then was going to come back to pick up the Chicago crowd. Unfortunately it took over an hour for it to get back to Boise and about two hours for it to get back. My problem was that I was planning on catching the CTA train from Midway Airport in Chicago over to Union Station to get on the 4:05 p.m. train down to Mattoon. With the flight delays, I wasn't going to get into Chicago until 4:00-ish, so that wasn't going to work with the train. The later train out of Chicago was booked, so I worked it out with the Southwest lady to get me on a flight to St. Louis tomorrow. This will work out splendidly since Greg is flying to St. Louis tomorrow too, and now he can just take me over to Charleston in his car--no more train tickets needed! It was quite the ordeal today though. One problem was that they had already put my suitcase with those going to Chicago, so the nice Southwest lady had to go out in the snow and round mine up so that it didn't head to the Windy City without me :-) Mom and Dad came back up to the airport at about 11:30 a.m. and picked me up. If only we had known--we could have slept in this morning!!