First Day - On to Vancouver

I hate the US air travel system.

Friday we had a one hour flight to Chicago and a 4.5 hour flight to Vancouver. So we would leave MN at 2:25 CT and arrive in Vancouver at 8 something PT. Long but no problem. I even hurried out of work to get to the airport to make sure I got seat assignments. I was sure that getting to Vancouver was going to go smoothly although getting there early meant we did have to sit for 1.5 hours in the MSP airport before the plane was scheduled to leave.

At around 1:45 they announced that the plane coming from Chicago that we would take back to Chicago didn't take off on schedule because of thunderstorms. They told us it would be there pretty soon so we would only leave MN thirty minutes late. That was okay, we would still have an hour in OHare to get to our flight to Vancouver.

When we landed in Chicago and I first checked the monitors, I saw that the departure of the flight to Vancouver was delayed from 5:15 to 5:53. Okay, that would give us time to eat something in the Chicago airport. When we got to the gate from the food court (Nicoise salad) the monitor said the departure time was now 6:05. Okay, no big deal....until minutes later it changed to 6:13.

They finally got us on a plane around 6:30. We taxied out onto the runway...and waited. After about ten minutes of waiting the pilot came on and said there were some storms nearby so all westbound takeoffs were suspended. He also told us that when takeoffs started again we would have to wait until the ten planes in front of us took off before we could leave.

"We're going to shut down the engines folks so we don't have to go back for more gas. In the meantime (starting a smile in his voice) you can go ahead and use your cell phones until we get started again." Oh boy.

We sat for a while. I stopped worrying about the time and concentrated on reading "The Commitments" which is a lot of fun. When we finally took off some 30+ minutes later the guy sitting behind me said "we coulda been in Hawaii by now." So true.

We landed in Vancouver around 11:15, about three hours later than scheduled. Exhaused we managed to get to a cab. The cab driver took us across the city to Downtown at approximate 100 miles an hour, the second most frightening cab ride of my life (our cab ride after arriving in Luoyang, China will always be tops).

We got to sleep at midnight PT which was 2 a.m. CT. I had no sense of the city whatsoever.