The Friendly Skies

I'm not someone who is on an airplane nearly every week, but I think I fly more than the average person. Even though I've racked up my fair share of frequent flier miles, I don't really have a lot of aviation horror stories. I don't know if I'm lucky or everyone else is just complaining about things that aren't really that big of a deal. We just got back from California, and our flight out was about as bad as things go for me when I fly, but in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't that bad. We were scheduled to fly into San Jose via O'Hare on Friday night. Bad weather in Chicago delayed the first leg of our flight by about two and a half hours and by the time we finally arrived in Chicago, our flight to San Jose was long gone. Fortunately, the last flight to San Francisco was delayed by an hour and it had a lot of open seats, so we managed to get on that plane. We landed in San Francisco at 1 AM PDT and managed to finagle a change to our rental car agreement so we could pick up the car in San Francisco and drop it off in San Jose. We drove down to San Jose and checked into our hotel around 2:30 AM. So other than being awake for about 24 hours straight on Friday/Saturday, having to pay an extra $100 to pick up our car at one airport and leave it at another, and having to wait until Saturday afternoon before getting our checked luggage, nothing bad really happened. I'm not saying that air travel is all fun and games; we have friends who have "celebrated" more than one Christmas while stranded at O'Hare. I've just found that even when things go bad while traveling, it's usually not as bad as it sounds.