Would You Like Me To Sit Here

Delta flight taking off at Minneapolis airport

I finally rolled into home at one-thirty this morning, after an eventful trip to Benn and Stacy's. The time spent there was wonderful, the trip to and from was my challenge. Benn reserved a ticket on Delta straight out of South Bend to Minneapolis. The original schedule was to leave at seven-thirty a.m., having to be at the airport an hour earlier. You can imagine my relief when the flight was postponed until eleven o'clock a.m. After waiting there all day with delays every two hours, the flight was finally cancelled at seven o'clock that night. I had to drive to Kalamazoo the next morning to catch a flight.

Once seated, the flight was uneventful. I finally arrived in Minneapolis and had to walk, run, ride an escalator, and take a tram to the other side of the airport before reaching the baggage pick up that was no less than 101 football lengths away, and on the other side of city, maybe the other side of the entire state. Simply making it to the baggage claim I felt like I had reached the top of Mount Everest. I passed signs of one airline after another until I finally found Delta. There were two bags left. I, after taken a rather long time to find my destination, thought the one bag was mine. It looked just like my bag. I couldn't figure out how they could have messed up the numbers on the corresponding baggage claim. So, I unzipped the front of my suitcase to grab my hat just as a man around my age stepped up and said, "Hey, that's my bag." I humbly apologized and assured him I wasn't trying to "steal" anything. I was merely trying to get my hat... The dear man helped me find my luggage and I thanked him rather much.

In the meantime, I told Benn to meet me at the baggage claim. Unlike me, Benn was familiar with the airport in Minneapolis and was waiting as I went out the door with my suitcase. He quickly grabbed my luggage and told me to get in the front seat as he disappeared around the back of the truck sitting directly in front of me. I didn't know the man driving. I thought Stacy had come with him. Well, maybe he came with a friend that I haven't met yet...so I thought. I obediently opened the front door and asked, "Would you like me to sit here?" The man had the oddest look on his face and said, "There wouldn't be room for my wife." "OH, I'm so sorry," I said as I started laughing profusely having spotted Stacy in the drivers seat in the vehicle on the other side of him. I closed the door and laughed all the way around his truck and opened the van door to which Stacy was driving. The truck driver rolled his window down and all of us had a good laugh. It's times like this that a good sense of humor is especially helpful.

On the trip home the flight was also delayed. We finally boarded the plane and sat on the tarmac for an hour and a half with the heat reaching temps of, I'm sure, well over one-hundred degrees. I finally rolled into home around one-thirty this morning, missing the original estimated-time-of-arrival by a mere three and a half hours.