neurological dryer lint

sorry, did i say something about 9:30? yeah.

the flight to philly from savannah was delayed about an hour. no biggie, we had plenty of time to make our connection to dayton. even moreso when we found out the dayton flight had been delayed a few hours due to some rain in philly. which kept us in the air and on the runway an extra hour or so.

so when we wandered into the philly airport, we were puzzled that the dayton flight wasn't even on the board. so we waited with several dozen others in hour-long lines to find out if we still had a flight and when it was leaving. lots of friendly, frustrated, confused folk, going to birmingham and detroit and other places, people who also believed a flight should be listed somewhere on a board if it actually existed.

eventually we got our answer: it would be leaving at 9:57pm. renee, however, was somehow on standby now. hmm. so we concocted a plan to get her on the plane instead of me and get her home, one that nearly involved beating the airline rep with a chair as we decyphered her cryptically worded instructions on switching the tickets.

so we sat hopefully next to a dude who was a living chris penn impression, waiting to see if both of us could be on the plane. didn't matter too much anyway, though, because about 45 minutes later they axed the flight. and - hey, neat - no hotels available, and no flights back to dayton on any airline until *maybe* 2pm the next day.

less than thrilled about camping out in the airport, we figure we'll be adventurous - rent a car and drive back to dayton overnight. b-mack answered his phone and was fortunately by a PC, and he google mapped the drive time back to DAY. ten hours. argh. we'd both done longer road trips in our time, though, and figured it wouldn't be too tough.

unfortunately i'd sworn off alamo rental cars for life after they gave me a riding lawnmower to drive for the week (that story later) - since they were the only rental car agency in the airport with anything left to drive. so at 9:30 we head down to pick up a car. it's raining pretty hard, and we're in a shuttle bus with two russian guys - one with a big silver briefcase and the other with no pants. sweetness - they depart at the same rental car place as us!

so now i feel fairly certain i'm going to get my wife killed in some messy accident the day before our first anniversary. great job, chief, you almost made it a year without making things a complete disaster. turns out the only trouble we had was getting the alamo chick to understand our story. renee and i don't have any real credit cards - just our check cards - which wouldn't work if we didn't have a canceled flight. a little arm-wrestling and we rolled out at 9:45 in a little malibu with a six-cylinder.

people driving in philly are totally nuts. there were like a dozen people pulled over on the side of the highway for no reason at all. at first i thought i was driving through a police chase of some sort - but no, it was just random dudes sitting on the highway. i was a little tense for the first half hour out of the city, because people were driving slower than they do here in the rain, and i was dodging trucks in a two-lane concrete-walled space.

once past the philly walls, 76 was surrounded by trees and hills and absolutely no exits at all. renee grabbed a double espresso at a starbucks we found, and then drove for close to five ours without batting an eye. it was ridiculous. we switched off south of pittsburgh and i drove the rest of the way to dayton. we made it in nine hours flat. i grabbed our luggage from the airline and our car from the long-term lot and then headed home.

renee picked up our cake, and we slept for a few hours. we have a rental car to return and then i'm gonna grill up some steak. i'm still pretty beat, though, and a little stunned by the whole story. i should know better than to expect an uncomplicated end to an uncomplicated week.