it wouldn't be a wintermute thanksgiving...

....without some travel adventures.

all day, it looks like the weather was going to hold off, and our flights appeared to be running on time.

sure enough, when we get to pensacola, our flight to atlanta is delayed. 30 minutes, then 60, then 120. they assure us, however, that we'll make our connection to dc, since everything going in and going out of atlanta is equally delayed.

so we leave florida around 9:00 eastern time, and land at 10:30. as soon as we land, i check the flight status on the crackberry, and amazingly, our connecting flight is only 10 minutes delayed. shit. it takes off before while we're still on the runway.

time to wintermute our way on to a new flight. i call delta while we're taxiing to the gate. turns out we missed the last flight to dulles. but there's still a couple of flights to national and bwi. but none of them have more than one seat available. i tell them to slot dr. wintermute on the the nearest departure (which turns out to be bwi). this lets me make sure she gets off the ground, and stand by on it and try to use my gold medallion status as leverage.

i confirm our new seats (dr. w to bwi, me to national an hour later) as we walk off the plane. turns out we have 10 mintues to get dr. w to her gate.

and the freaking tram is broken. for the uninitiated, hartsfield is sprawling nightmare when things are running on time, much less the end of thanksgiving with massive weather delays.

i grab my bags and one of dr. w's bags and tell her to go ahead. we're in terminal C. we need to get to T. on foot.

halfway there, we see that her departure has been delayed 45 minutes. whew.

we catch our breath.

at the gate, we check her in and i get myself to the top of the standby list. i'm the first one called and now we're both on the plane. i snagged a first class seat for dr.w, which perplexes the gate agent (at first, she doesn't believe us, but i insist that we have one for her). sure enough, after interrogating us ('do you know what class ticket you purchased?'), dr. w's boarding pass prints us 1c. i also managed to slip us through without paying the change fee (though it's insulting that delta would make us pay a change fee in the first place when our original flight delay was the reason to change flights. anyway, we got dr. w out the $50 change fee on the way down here, and they really ought to have charged us, since that was truly for the convenience of getting an earlier flight). fairly satisfying.

should get home around 2 am.

tomorrow morning will suck.