RUNAWAY

minusmanhattan:

Blizzard by Navid Baraty.

Story Time: Gosh, I have a story for everything. Anyways, I realize this photo is of a blizzard in NYC, but my story takes place in Minneapolis. Here’s the deal, my family was supposed to go Disney World for Christmas. (We frequent Disney because we have a timeshare.) Unfortunately, the day we are to fly out also happens to be the day the clouds decide to decimate the state with feet of snow. So, we wake up, probably around 5 am and head off to the airport after checking that our flight is still on time. It’s snowing all the while, but it doesn’t matter since hopefully we’ll be flying out of it soon enough. We arrive at the airport, check in, and ask if the flight is still departing because the snow is significant. They assure us, “Yes, we can fly out of this.” We get through security, arrive at our gate, by the way, we don’t actually have seat assignments yet either, so that’s a little annoying, but not really to me. I could care less where I sit as long as I get to my enjoyable destination. Anyways, we’re given exit row seats. I have so much leg room. I’m basically livin’ the dream minus the fact that I’m next to two randoms. We’re basically the last to board, which is how I like it. Now, we wait on the plane for a little while, then the captain is like “Alright, we have to de-ice, and then as soon as we do, we’ll be taking off.” So they de-ice the plane which takes over a half an hour. I have a window seat, so I notice that even after de-icing, snow and ice has once again appeared on the window. Next, they announce, “Well, they’re shutting down the runways for about 20 minutes because they can’t keep up with the snow.” Meanwhile, the flight crew is assuring us, “We’ll take off, I don’t know why they would cancel the flight, the crew’s good for 8 hours.” Next, we hear that the runways will be shut down for an hour, so they take us back to our gate. Since it’s been 2 hours at this point, according to the Passenger Bill of Rights, we have to get off the plane. They tell us we can leave our bags on the plane, we don’t because we’re not stupid. However, literally once we get into the airport, they announce, “We’re canceling this flight.” Cue dozens of people running through the airport to book the next flight out of there. We land flights out at 7 pm—it’s about noon at this time, but we’re patient and willing to wait. We have talked to our hotel, who will hold our room for us. After some time, they then proclaim the closing of the airport until 5 am the next morning. The longest MSP has ever shut down. So…we cancel our vacation entirely. I’m obviously devastated…and pezzed. Bear in mind, we were also supposed to meet my brother and sister-in-law down there they live in northern Florida and were going to drive down to spend the weekend with us. So he’s giving us all these alternatives…but it’s a white-out and the airport is closed. We have very little options. He literally suggested driving down to O’Hare to fly out. Not gonna happen. Next step: get our luggage back. However, they wouldn’t even give us our luggage back until hours later. Semi-fortunately, there’s a tram to MOA, so we go down there for a little bit, but the train is freaking packed, and the train also stops for some time because another train is stuck in the Mall of America station. Seriously?! Anything and everything went wrong. I don’t even remember what we did at MOA because I’m pretty sure we had carry-on luggage. That’s just all a blur. We come back, finally get our luggage, and head out to drive home in this mess of a blizzard. The plows are no longer running and there’s over a foot of snow to drive through. FUNTIMESFORALL. We somehow made it home alive, but not until like 9 pm. Worst day in my memory so far.