Monday, June 2, 2008

Me N The City: Part 1 – Mother Nature Hates Me

As most of you know, this past Friday was the opening night of the movie Sex And The City. Quite some time ago, my friend Sarah and I wistfully dreamed of going to NYC to see it. This past weekend, after a lot of planning, scheming and dreaming, we made that dream a reality. Since it was a weekend jam-packed with blog fodder, I’ll take this slowly so as not to overwhelm either you, dear reader, or my fingers.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the flight there is apparently fueled by false hope. Friday morning came after an excited night of little sleep. I was soooo eager to get to NYC to be ab fab with my lifelong friend. The idea was to get to NYC early enough to have a leisurely late lunch, get showered, changed and perfectly coiffed, enjoy a drink at the hotel bar and then saunter over to the movie, arriving about 20 minutes prior to start time. That was the plan.

Since Sarah lives in KC and I in DSM, we were meeting up at O’Hare to fly to NYC together. That morning the sky was dark when I woke but not menacing. All the thunder and fireworks had moved on overnight. Of course what I didn’t realize at the time was that they had all moved *east* … to Chicago. When I arrived at the airport my flight was optimistically listed as “on time”. Liars. Within the hour we were notified that O’Hare was on “ground hold” (i.e. no one in, no one out) and that we would be delayed. My 8:20 flight turned into a 9:50 flight.

Once we finally got off the ground, we didn’t exactly make exceptional time. I landed in Chicago about two hours later than planned. Anxiously I checked the departures and was overjoyed to discover that our connecting flight to Newark was also delayed by weather and hadn’t left yet. We had about 10 minutes to make it. Since I knew Sarah’s flight had left KC before mine left DSM I sent her a quick text to make sure she was in the terminal and told her I was on my way to the gate. Once I got to the gate and realized I hadn’t heard from Sarah, I checked in with the gate attendant. She informed me that Sarah’s flight had just landed but had not gotten to the gate yet and that odds were Sarah wasn’t going to make it. The attendant had been kind enough to book us on the next flight however that flight didn’t leave until 1:10pm. Let me spare you the suspense…. Sarah’s flight didn’t cooperate, she didn’t make it in time and five minutes after the gate door closed Sarah sadly showed up to meet me.

Undaunted we grabbed a bite to eat and chatted until our next flight. While eating we went through the schedule in our heads. Our new flight would put us in Newark around 4:30. Uh-oh. The movie started right at 7:00pm and we knew opening night would be packed. We finished up our snack, hopped on our plane and hoped for the best….

… to be continued.

1 comment:

Our Family said...

Oh the suspense is killing me... :) I want to hear more! (I ended up going with my mother in law and sisters-in-law Sat night)