I’m just recovering from a harrowing travel nightmare. I was supposed to fly back down to Florida from DC last night, getting in after midnight, and then get up in the morning for a flight to LA.

That’s bad enough, and that was if things went according to plan. However, this trip was one of the least “going according to plan” types I’ve experienced in a long time. A front came through northern Virginia just as I was arriving at the airport, and I found out my flight to Atlanta was delayed. The first delay would have allowed me to still catch my connection to Fort Lauderdale, but the delays kept piling up (apparently the plane on which I was to depart was stuck at JFK, as a result of bad weather in New York). I talked the situation over with Delta, and they assured me that not only were they not going to be able to get me home that night, but they wouldn’t be able to do so (at least with any confidence) in the morning either, not in time to catch my flight to California, anyway.

So like Jim Lovell (not to make too grandiose a comparison to our respective situations), I gave up the moon, i.e., I resigned myself that I wasn’t going to get home that night, and determined instead to find an alternate route to California that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. I negotiated an exchange with American for a non-stop from Dulles to replace my non-stop from Fort Lauderdale in the morning, and got vouchers from Delta. The big problem at that point was that until my flight in the morning, I was stuck in DC with no room, or reservation. I schlepped my luggage up and down non-functional escalators at the Metro to get back to Crystal City, to discover that not only did I have no room, but there were no rooms to be had, due to all of the other people in the same boat who had been possessed of more sense than me, and got rooms as soon as they figured out the score instead of wasting time on the phone worrying about an unrelated flight the next day. Oh, and did I mention that my cell phone was almost dead, and that I’d forgotten to pack a charger, which was one of the things that I was going to retrieve on my brief visit home?

So anyway, I reschlepped luggage up and down non-functional escalators back to Reagan on the Metro, and looked for a rental car with which to hie myself out Dulles way and procure a room. The only one available was a full-size for seventy bucks a day, before tax, though she was kind enough to waive the drop fee for returning it to Dulles instead of Reagan. A taxi would have been cheaper, but not having a room, I didn’t know where to tell a taxi to go.

Anyway, long story short, I did find a room in Herndon, got a few hours sleep that (considering the cost of both car and room) cost me about forty bucks an hour, and I did manage to finally get to LA, though we sat on the tarmac for half an hour after arrival due to the fact that another aircraft was having minor maintenance problems at our designated gate.

I know I’m making this sound pretty bad. It was actually much worse–I’m just too beat right now to expound on the whole odyssey at length.

And why, you ask, was it so consarned important that I get to LA today?

Because I have a flight to St. Louis at 6:30 from here in the morning.

Don’t ask.