Chicago: Final Chapter

I'm eager to move on to telling you either about the sweater I'm knitting or the sourdough bread I'm making, so I'll finish up the Chicago tale in one fell swoop.

As I mentioned in the last post, my sister and I missed our flight from Chicago to Washington because we attended TWO Oprah tapings instead of the originally scheduled one. Even attending one taping was going to make it a tight squeeze to get to the airport on time, but we felt we could do it. We knew we couldn't make it after two tapings.

We arrived at ORD an hour or so after our flight had taken off, so that flight was now a moot point. Plan B was to try to fly stand-by. Imagine our joy, however, when the check-in clerk scheduled us for a 3:00 flight out of Chicago! We had assigned seats, we weren't flying stand-by, we were feeling pretty darned smug. In fact, I think I seem to remember we high-fived each other, or something close to it,  and bragged how easy the rescheduling had gone.

One should know better than to ever feel smug at an airport. 

Our flight left Chicago late, we got into Reagan Airport late, and we had only minutes to get from United Airlines to US Air. We screamed our way through security, with many good people stepping aside to let us pass, and raced to our gate. All the while we could hear ourselves being paged over the speaker system, advising us the boarding gate was about to close. We raced down the escalator, ran to the gate,...and the attendant directed us to the gate on the left. We raced to the left, where the attendant directed us back to the original gate. Just as we got back there, the gate closed.

We were doomed. Three and a half hours later we finally boarded our flight, the last flight of the day, for Maine.

So that was that. Another story with a happy ending.