Home

Ah, I forgot to mention that I am home now!

The story of getting home was fairly ridiculous. We were trying to transport 8 people and lots of luggage and taiko gear purchased in Japan, which slowed down every move we made.

The journey to get back to St. Louis started at around 2 pm Tokyo time on Sunday (around midnightish Saturday US Central). Flight 3 hours later from Narita took about 13 hours to get to Chicago. Once in Chicago (now it was Monday), we learned that the next flight to St. Louis had been cancelled due to rain.

Seeking another route home, we investigated renting vans and cars to get us and our junk home -- none to be had. No trains. No Megabus. American Airlines was not interested in subsidizing our hotel costs overnight in Chicago, either (I understand they don't do that anymore after the airline bankruptcies). We got set up with some alternate flights the next day from Chicago --> Des Moines --> St. Louis.

(I'll elide over lots of cuss words.)

Since we were mostly immobile, the only choice was to pay for rooms at the Quality Inn near the airport and crash. After some pizza dinner mostly everyone just passed out asleep til...

Tuesday morning we learned that budgeting 2.5 hours of time at the airport was not long enough to get everything processed and onto planes. At this point, it was every (wo)man (and his/her checked baggage) for him/herself.

Four of us somehow got *different* flights directly from Chicago to St. Louis. The rest of us, your author included, got on the original flight to Des Moines after booking it through security and down many hallways, just barely making the flight.

Sat in Des Moines for 2 hours and then learned that American cancelled the Des Moines --> St. Louis flight, and that I was going back to Chicago.

Back to Chicago on the tiny pencil plane, only to have just a few minutes to spare finding the *next* plane that would take us to St. Louis!

And thus I finally arrived, exhausted and fresh outta cusswords, around 8:30 pm Tuesday! I am so happy to be home! And I kind of unreasonably hate Chicago and American Airlines now, although I hear it's technically the control tower's call what flights get cancelled, and that Chicago doesn't actually control its own weather.