traveling the midwest: blooper reel style

Being so well traveled, I have my fair share of air travel snafus. You know, the things that go horribly awry while in transit. Once, in New Zealand, Husband and I had to throw out 20 lbs of luggage in order to board our flight to Ethiopia. We were in the process of moving, so we had to throw out a good number of items from our year overseas. A terrible, yet oddly effective, way to purge.

Yes, that was a bad airport moment. This one was worse.

Husband and I arrive at the United Airways counter in Omaha, Nebraska with passports in hand, ready to collect our boarding pass and be on our way. Swiping our IDs didn’t work. Putting in our credit card didn’t work.

Commence worrying. Husband can’t remember flight number and I mentally beat myself for not forcing him to forward me the flight information. After a phone call to the parentals (who conveniently had internet access and looked up said information), husband went to the counter to talk to the physical assistant.

He came back with that look on his face. The look that inspires utter dread.

“We’re in the wrong airport.”

In my head I was thinking, Oh, there must be some smaller airport nearby.

This thought was immediately shattered with my husband telling me, “Our flight leaves from Lincoln.”

I stared at him with what must have been my Oh dear god you have got to be kidding me right now expression while he phoned the inlaws to come retrieve us. We’d just driven from Lincoln to get to the Omaha airport. Somehow, the information had gotten mixed up.

I looked at the time and paled again. We had an hour and a half until our flight took off. With a sane-person driving, Omaha and Lincoln are about an hour apart from each other.

Cue father-in-law wheeling furiously to the curb in a borrowed red Dodge truck. We pile into the vehicle and tear away so fast that we leave David’s grandmother behind.

“We’ll come back for her later,” father-in-law said as he sped away.

I spent the next fifty minutes trying to keep anxiety from taking over. Cornfields sped by in a green blur. I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t be tempted to throttle my husband.

Fortunately, the Lincoln airport is small. As in, teeny tiny. We dashed up to the counter mere minutes before our flight was supposed to take off, finagled the one woman at the counter into giving us our boarding passes. There was no line at security, and by some form of miracle we ended up making the flight.

Moral of the story? Always check your flight information before you travel to the wrong city to catch a flight. And stay with people who have internet so you can check said flight information. It will save you much grief.