Clap if you believe in fairies...

...now I certainly do-evil Fairies. Because I swear there is a sadistic sometimes ironic travel fairy following me around trying to see how much it can heap on me that I can laugh off.

I got my first real taste from this fairy (evil sprite more like it) Christmas of my freshman year at Grinnell. I'm sitting in the airport waiting for my flight and all the flights around me are getting canceled, not because it is snowing, but because-it is foggy. Too foggy for planes to take off, really?! I know I'm doomed, but it gets to the point that every single flight has been cancelled except mine. Hah! Yeah, not so much. My flight was just the last to get cancelled. I don't panic though, not even when the airport makes an announcment that there will be no flights out of the Des Moines airport that day-maybe not even in the next two days. While everyone else around me is cursing at the poor airport workers, I am laughing quietly to myself. After all getting angry at people just doing their jobs is NOT helpful. It's finally my turn to rebook my flight. They arrange it so that I can fly out of the Omaha airport, but first I have to take a shuttle at five o'clock in the morning. I decide there is no way that I will take a nap because I do not want to risk missing the shuttle. So, I stay up till 5 in the morning (it was around 8pm when I rebooked my flight) and take the shuttle to Omaha. At the Omaha airport I have to wait eight hours for my flight and eventually I am on a direct flight to Washington DC, completely exhausted, but still laughing the whole experience off (hey, at least it makes a good story). Want to know how long it all took? Let me put it this way: I left Grinnell almost the exact same time my sister left Tanzania-and she got to DC first!

I encountered the fairy a couple of times on my roadtrip from San Antonio too (already detailed on this blog). Then, about a week later, when it was time for me to fly to Montana to see Emily Jane, we met again. My flight from DC to Chicago went fine, but at O'Hare I had to go outside in order to get onto my airplane for Billings. This surprised me because I really thought O’Hare could afford those boarding things that lead straight to the plane-I guess this recession has hit everyone hard. Being outside wouldn’t have been a problem, if it had not been raining. Better yet, there was some kind of hold up on the boarding ramp, so I got to stand outside for ten minutes before I could board. As I stood outside absolutely miserable and wet, I couldn’t stop smiling because it was all so ridiculous and oddly not surprising that this would happen to me. I finally got onto the plane, very moist, but amused by how much the airport staff apologized. I thought the fun was over, but the fairy had other plans. There were storms over Billings and the airplane did not have enough gas to wait out the storms. Therefore we got to divert to Bozeman-an example of the fairy’s ironic sense of humor. Emily Jane had told me that she preferred to pick me up at Bozeman airport, but the flights were cheaper at Billings. If only I had just flown to Bozeman. In other words, my flight had to divert to Bozeman, refuel and then fly to Billings. Then, after finally meeting Emily (after making her wait extra long), we had to drive to Bozeman.

Ha ha, isn’t that funny. It’s ok you can laugh, I certainly did. Do you hear that evil ironic travel fairy? You haven’t beaten me down yet. Bring…it…on.