My father-in-law came up from Florida, arriving last night to be here for Thanksgiving and his twin son's 60th birthday celebration this weekend. His visit is a surprise and they won't find out he is here until Thursday at the family gathering. For now he is staying at our house incognito.
I have only been involved in long distance holiday travel once. In 2004, my wife and I drove to Florida to be with my wife's parents for Christmas. We took two days to make the trip down and two days back. It was effortless to travel and spent the days with the folks and The Mouse (long before it went woke). My father-in-law flew up, arriving late last night with a scheduled arrival time of 10:45 PM. My wife asked me to go get him so she could get the house ready. I had done some Thanksgiving meal advance food prep and got everything ready for work today before leaving the house about 9:45 PM, so it shouldn't be a problem. Or so I thought. I arrived at the standby cell phone parking lot about 9:35 PM where the lot was full to capacity. That should have been my first warning what was about to come. Oh well, I went across RT. 75 to the bowling alley lot and waited there for his phone call to pick him up.
Normally, travel in and out of Bradley is smooth. It was now 11:37 PM and he still hasn't called. My plan was to try and call him and if he didn't answer, head over to the arrival area to see if I could find him wandering around. He answered and told me he just got his bag and was heading outside. I told him I was on my way.
The short drive over to the arrival area was total gridlock. Traffic coming across from the left getting off I-91 and RT. 20 would run the light and jam the intersection, and I watched my traffic signal in the distance cycle several times with nowhere for traffic in my lane to go. All of a sudden it started to move and as I got closer I saw why. Airport security was not letting people stop to wait to pickup passengers but was making them go around again. Oh yeah? I don't think so. I called The Old Man back and told him to start walking down the sidewalk facing traffic so I could stop as soon as I saw him. Another couple of hundred feet of crawling and there he was. A female airport security guard was blowing her whistle and waving her lighted wand for me to move, but I ignored her, stopped my truck, jumped out and grabbed his bags while he got in the cab. It was now about 10 minutes until midnight but I got him and now we had to get out of the airport. There were state troopers waving cars through the crosswalk stop signs where there were no pedestrians so traffic could keep moving. Relief came when we hit the entrance ramp for RT. 20.
As we left the airport he told me what happened. There was a problem with the plane at the departure gate in Orlando. After the plane was fully loaded and they were going to depart, some piece of equipment on the plane was malfunctioning and a technician would have to come out and replace it. Whatever it was it didn't take the plane out of service and they got their push back from the gate 45 minutes late. The ride home was uneventful, except for the surprise patch of black ice I hit on a bridge on a state road that made my truck briefly slide sideways but not out of control. We got home and tried to be quiet because my wife had already turned in, but of course the dogs went nuts and woke her up. The Old Man got ready to turn in and I got to bed about 12:45 AM. I was up at 04:30 AM for work. A nap or early to bunk tonight will get me caught up on sleep. Luckily he will not be going back to Florida for a couple of weeks, well after the holiday travel rush.
A happy and blessed Thanksgiving to all.
