I don’t care what the context is, being 57th in line is rarely a good thing. So I can’t really say that I was terribly enthused to hear that due to the international rush hour, our shuttle to Boston where I was to grab a connecting flight back to Denver had 56 other planes waiting in front of it. Somewhere in our seemingly interminable wait on the tarmac I began making plans to be stranded in my pseudo-hometown, even going so far as to begin text messaging friends there to see if they were around. With slightly less than an hour between connections, and my travel luck being what it is1, my being stranded seemed more or less like a foregone conclusion.
But through either a.) the JetBlue folks cutting in line, b.) some sort of localized time displacement phenomenon, or c.) a miracle, I somehow ended up at Logan 5 minutes before my flight had begun to board. Still have no idea how that happened, and frankly was just the slightest bit disappointed to have made my flight as I was sort of looking forward to crashing in Boston.
More importantly, as an ardent believer in the Navajo metaphysical idea that life is an ongoing tension between good and evil, my unnatural good fortune was as potentially serious a concern as misfortune would be. Thus it was with a mixture of delight and superstitious dread that I discovered that not only had I made my flight (when by all rights I should have missed it), not only had received an exit row seat, but I’d been granted a whole row of them (and they didn’t charge me anything for that privilege, you hear me United?2). This week’s sign of the Apocalypse, and all that.
Surprisingly enough, my plane did not fall out of the sky on the way over to Denver, but arrived a soothing 10 minutes behind schedule. At which point the universe sought to further balance itself out as I had to chip my car free of an inch and a half of ice with naught but an empty CD case. I should note that this was only necessary because an obviously selfish friend of mine refused to get dressed and drive the 40 miles out to DIA at 1 in the morning to bring me a scraper. Can you imagine the nerve?
In other news, still unresolved is the question of whether or not my colleague has been infected with my travel curse, as he was apparently delayed two hours and from the looks of it might be stranded overnight in Dallas. Welcome to my world. The best advice I can give you, Cote, is to learn how to build yourself a little fort out of movable airport bench seats, two t-shirts and a fleece vest. You’d be surprised at how often that comes in handy. Or maybe you wouldn’t, given your recent misfortune.
