What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? I’m feeling pretty strong right now, let me tell you. We spent today (it’s now 11:55pm PST) trying to get home as all the powers of winter weather and Southwest Airlines combined to thwart us. In the end we triumphed but there were casualties – all of our bags, as best we can tell, are in St. Louis or thereabouts. So it goes, or doesn’t go, as the case may be.

Things started out well enough – we had breakfast with Chuck’s sister after working out at the fitness center in Lapeer that we by today were feeling very at home in, then headed to Detroit airport to catch our flights (Chuck’s other sister and brother-in-law were also flying home today). We arrived in plenty of time and made our way to the gate after checking all of our bags through to LAX only to discover that the departure time for our Detroit to St. Louis leg had changed from 2:55pm EST to 5:01pm EST. This was not good, as we had a connecting flight in St. Louis to LAX that left there at 3:50pm CST. For those of you who aren’t keeping track, let me spell it out for you: the connecting flight to LAX would be long gone by the time we finally got to St. Louis. I called Southwest on my cell phone to ascertain the facts and learned that all was as we feared. We re-booked on a later flight that went from St. Louis to Phoenix, then from Phoenix to LAX that had us finally getting in to LAX at 10:15pm PST. Beggars can’t be choosers so we took it – but the ticket agent on the phone confirmed what we had already concluded – there was no way our bags were going to keep up with us. Heigh-ho. We whiled away the time in Detroit by accessing their wireless Internet connection and doing some work, listening to our iPods, and trying to get boarding passes for all of the connecting flights – a big no-go there, as they would only give us boarding passes for originating flights, and none of our connecting flights were originating flights – I sort of understand that (the only originating flight we were actually on was the Detroit to St. Louis flight) but consider it a very bogus and frustrating rule. It was all pretty moot as it happened. By the time we finally left Detroit however, it was not 5:01pm but 6:00pm. We lost an hour flying to St. Louis but even so were still going to be late for our St. Louis-Phoenix flight. Argh!!!! They radioed ahead and we were told they would hold the two big connecting flights (to Phoenix and Portland, I think) for us. We finally landed at 6:35pm in St. Louis but our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30pm. Running like fools for the gate (which thankfully was close), about five of us made it before they ran out of seats and closed the doors. Chuck and I ended up having to choose sucky and suckier seats (he got a middle seat between a tall guy and a small woman, lucky dog – I got a window seat next to an older couple who were seat hogs *sigh*). Sadly this was the long leg at over three hours and my video iPod chose this moment in time to go on the fritz. Double argh!!!!

We made it to Phoenix pretty much on time and ended up on a not too full flight, toasting the end of the very long adventure with a glass of wine. Our friend Skip picked us up, God bless him and we got home by 11:00pm PST sans luggage but at least we’re here.