I woke up Thursday morning to discover that my flight from Chicago to Grand Rapids had been canceled 12 hours early, and United had automatically rebooked me for a flight on Friday morning…at 5am. Ignoring the “I don’t want to” aspect of getting up early enough to get there, this was an impossible situation. The BART doesn’t run that early, the airport is an hour-long drive from my friend’s place, and I wasn’t going to ask him and myself to get up and leave at 2am to catch the flight back, so I had it moved to a later time. Now I was leaving at 10:50 at night. Not ideal, but at least I could get to the airport now.
After rearranging my travel plans, my friend and I spent my bonus two days doing a bit more wandering. The previous four days of walking around had taken a toll on my lets and feet, so I mostly stayed at his place and got caught up on Big Bang Theory and started in on Dr. Who. Not really the kind of thing you’d want to do when you’re on vacation in California, but rule number 1 of vacationing is to do whatever sounds good, and at that point, that sounded good.
Friday night we went to Saul’s for my last meal in California, and I did the bad Catholic thing and went with a burger. It was delicious. I was beyond happy to order something “as rare as you can serve it” and have it cooked so. It was also the only time in California that I had really bit into something nice and red and meaty. Sufficiently fortified, I thanked my friend for letting me crash on his couch for a week and made my last foray on the BART back to the airport. The train trip was quiet enough, and I managed to make it through security at SFO without incident (despite the set of small screwdrivers I had left in my bag by mistake).
Then came the lousy part: the wait. Invariably, when you leave yourself two hours to get through airport security, you make it through in 10 minutes and spend an hour and forty-five idling at the gate. I hadn’t done any exploring, though, so I wandered around for a while, and was rewarded with a bluescreened display. I’m always amused by those, and these days I have a vague enough grasp of what’s going on that I can sometimes venture a guess as to what went wrong.
The flight back was a totally different experience than the flight out. We flew on a newer 777, which had a few extra inches of legroom. My row buddy at the window was nice and normal-sized, and seemed mostly intent on getting sleep. I threw in my earbuds, tried to ignore the silent film they were showing, and took my best stab at getting some sleep on the plane.
I failed, completely.
I might have dozed off once or twice for a few minutes, but the simple fact is that I really cannot sleep sitting up. Or slightly reclining. Just not happening. I did, however, sneak a few peeks out the window. It was clear skies the entire flight, and it was really cool to see the cities below as little islands of sodium lamps in a sea of darkness. I tried a few times to guess roughly which cities were which based on their size, but I was off by a few hundred miles, because after only about 3 hours we arrived in Chicago, early.
I’ve been in O’Hare several times in the last 5 or 6 years, but I have never been in there at 4:30 in the morning. On the way in, I struck up some conversation with the girl sitting next to me, and we wandered around for a while and grabbed a coffee and just killed time waiting for the next flight. At one point she left to go meet up with some friends for her next flight, and I was left to wander the quiet airport on my own. With nothing better to do, I decided to take some pictures and see if I could locate a decent Cinnabon.
If you’re going to be stuck for a few hours in an airport, I’d pick O’Hare any day. In the course of my wanderings, I stumbled across a WWII-era F6F Hellcat and figured out who the airport was named after:
Found Airport Sushi (memo to self: try this some time):
A hydroponics garden:
An art exhibit by local students:
And took in a sunrise over by the American terminal:
I grabbed some breakfast and a Diet Coke and mostly tried to keep moving. At this point I’d been up for about 24 hours, which was a first for me. I wasn’t tired so much as I was just incapable of most higher-level thought at that point. I was just hoping to make it home before I started to develop a case of fatigue-based rage.
It happened anyways.
My final flight, which was supposed to board at 8:30am, arrived and debarked on time and without incident, but the flight attendant for the trip back was a no-show. We spent two hours idling at the gate, listening to the United gate agents explain that they didn’t know when we’d have a replacement attendant, and I sat and prayed that they didn’t push the plane away from the gate and decide to reschedule us for a flight out at 3pm. Finally, they snagged an attendant from an inbound flight and we were on our way. I landed in Grand Rapids an hour and a half late, but I was home. I also managed to snag the last four Cinnabons in the Grand Rapids airport. It’s the small things that matter most, sometimes.
I had an absolutely amazing time out in California. While I wish my return home hadn’t been delayed by two days, it was awesome to take some time off and go somewhere. I may still take the occasional staycation from time to time, but it was so much better to take time off and go somewhere.
Now I just need to decide where I’m going next year…
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