After that adventure, I was expecting my travel the following day to get screwed up because of the storm. However, by the time I left on Thursday at 6p EST the runways were cleared and my flight took off on time. And that's where the fun began. As I boarded the plane and went to take my seat I sat down and looked around and noticed who was sitting next to me but Senator Baucus. He was already situated and had a pile of newspapers and files on his lap. Being a fellow frequent flier, I respect the I-have-a-bunch-of-things-to-read-out-and-ready-and-that-means-I-don't-want-to-chat scene. Unfortunately for him, the guy sitting next to him did not share that understanding.
As soon as we ascended a bit the captain came on and said "You might've noticed it took us longer than usual to get to 8,000 feet. We have a problem with our pressurization system and we can't pressurize the cabin. So we can only fly at 8,000 feet and the means we have to fly slowly and we don't have enough fuel to get us from DCA to MSP at that speed." Finally, we got the punchline we kind of all knew was coming: "We're going to have to divert to Detroit." Fabulous. Since I had about an hour layover in MSP to get to my flight to Helena, this pretty much guaranteed that I wasn't getting home on Thursday. The most amusing part was that the captain tried to make light of it by telling us that most people don't get to fly at 8k feet across the country. Really? It's DARK out. Anyway, we landed in Detroit where they luckily found us another plane. At this point I had realized that not only was Max on the plane, but Tester, his wife and a bunch of staffers were also there. I thought maybe, just maybe if we were only 30 minutes or so late in MSP they might hold the plane. Maybe.
But of course simply getting off of one plane, walking to the next gate and boarding another one could not be that easy. First they had to print everyone vouchers for food and hotels in MSP (yeah that would be me and the rest of the Helena flight). Then they couldn't let us boad because the computer wasn't letting them use the same flight number. By the time they got it figured out, 45 minutes had gone by. And, of course, since our new plane had been sitting on the ground all day, we got extra-special long-term de-icing treatment. Needless to say at this point in the story, we arrived in MSP 90 minutes after our Helena flight had taken off without us.
So I spent the night in a hotel in MSP somewhere (really "the night" means I was actually in the room for 6 hours). There is only one direct flight between MSP and HLN and it's the 10p one that I was on on Thursday so I wasn't going to wait around for that one Friday night. I ended up taking 3 flights (MSP to Denver, Denver to SLC and then SLC to HLN) and, after 24 hours of travel, landed in Helena at about 5p Friday night. Clearly Baucus had better connections because he was giving a speech at the Capitol in Helena while I was flying from Denver to SLC :)
It was an adventure but given how many flights I take each week, it's pretty remarkable that this is the first night I've spent in one of my connecting cities. Delta gave me so many meal vouchers I couldn't even use them all (they expire at the end of the day) so I gave the rest of mine to a serviceman in SLC who was most appreciative. To be honest the biggest drawback of the trip was that thanks to Mr blabbermouth in 14C I was unable to get my 15 minutes to chat with Senator Baucus about my thoughts on health reform. Oh well. Given the frequency of both of our flight schedules, I'm guessing I may get another chance sometime :)
