Friday 13 February 2009

We also stayed up late last night watching the news reports of a flight into Buffalo, NY that crashed that evening (not a JetBlue flight). Everybody on the flight, and one person on the ground, died. It was very scary.

We woke early and went downstairs to catch the shuttle to the airport, but it had left half an hour previously, so we went back upstairs and took showers and tried again a little later. It was touch and go whether we would actually get on the shuttle that arrived, since it was packed full of other travelers, but a secondary shuttle arrived and we got to JFK airport. We made it on the flight to Burbank, but only with Divine Intervention (probably in the form of the plane crash last night that frightened other travelers into cancelling their flight to Burbank this morning). We saw no point in wasting such drastic intervention, so we flew.

As soon as we got to Burbank, we went to the Hertz counter and rented a car for a few hours to drive to Long Beach. We stopped for lunch, since we weren't going to have much of a chance later, drove like crazy through the rain, and made it to the Long Beach airport just after they had closed the flight to Las Vegas where our bag was waiting. So we rescheduled for flying directly to Salt Lake City about 5 hours later, and went to find a corner to wait. Of course it was full of historical memorabilia. I learned about Bette Murphy who was a riveter during and after WWII in the Long Beach area. I don't think she's any relation to me, but she seems to have been memorable in her work ethic.

At 4 hours before flight departure we moved through security (it was stiill raining) and ensconced ourselves in the gate area. We all had books to read or puzzles to do, so we did, for 4 hours.

What with one thing and another, 4 hours passed. We made it on the flight and got home to freezing Utah at midnight (without our checked bag). Cat picked us up and we collapsed in our beds.

It snowed the next morning.