The long trip home

As I’ve mentioned, Thomas ran the Fargo marathon this past Saturday. Fargo is about eight hours by car so Meg and I weren’t really up for the trip, being that she’s two years old and I’m eight months pregnant. Since he was going alone, he decided to fly. It was a little more expensive, but not too much. He got to Fargo Friday, ran the race Saturday, then relaxed for a few hours before going to the airport. At which point everything went to hell.

There are no direct flights from Fargo to Des Moines (both smallish airports), so he was connecting through Minneapolis. There was a massive power outage in Minneapolis, leaving the airport without power and cancelling all flights in and out. Nothing Delta could really do about that, but it sucked none the less.

(BTW, he was supposed to be in an airplane at the time of the supposed rapture, so we thought of a few theories as to why the power was out. Perhaps someone cut the power so there wouldn’t be planes crashing into the city after their pilots were raptured? Or maybe a power employee REALLY thought he was going to be raptured, so there was no point going to work, and without him there doing his job something went wrong?)

Luckily, Thomas was staying in the NDSU dorms for the marathon. They did not have a one-night rate for the marathon – he had to pay for two nights even though he was only planning on being there Friday. Delta put him on an American flight for Sunday morning and he went back to the dorm, where they let him check back in and stay for his already-paid-for second night.

Sunday morning he shows up at the airport at 6 a.m. and American informs him the flight is full and they don’t have seats for any of the rebooked Delta passengers. He (and several other passengers who were supposed to be on his flight the night before) goes back to the Delta counter, where they tell him they now can’t get him to Des Moines until MONDAY morning, over 36 hours after he was supposed to get home. He looked into renting a car and driving, but it was going to cost $600.

I told him I’d come pick him up if they could at least get him close to Des Moines – maybe Omaha (two hours away)? The problem was that to get pretty much anywhere, he had to get to Minneapolis (one of Delta’s hubs), and there weren’t any seats until the next day. There was another person there in the same situation, so they decided to rent a car and split the cost of driving to Minneapolis (which was way cheaper than driving to Des Moines). From there, Delta could fly him to Cedar Rapids (2 ½ hours away), where I would pick him up.

Just in case, Thomas called a friend of his who grew up in Cedar Rapids and goes home often. He happened to be there this weekend, so he picked Thomas up from the Cedar Rapids airport and drove him to the Des Moines airport to pick up his car.

He finally got home at 9pm Sunday night.

On the upside, we now have Delta vouchers I’m going to use to fly to the Blathering.