Nothing personal, Chicago, I know you’re a lovely city, but I was REALLY hoping to get home tonight. Not tomorrow night.*
It’s actually not Chicago’s fault. It’s Zurich’s fault: Zurich had The Fog. And of course airplanes get confused by fog (I lived in San Francisco long enough to understand this….).
I spent nine hours watching the plane-tracker dealie, watching the estimated arrival time get shifted back and forth and back and forth…hope rising, hope falling…then we actually touched down with nearly an hour to spare, but after a VERY slow taxi to the gate, and a long dash to the immigration line (and getting shuffled to a VIP line and then shunted aside for some diplomats, damn them), and then through Customs, and then a glacially slow tram from the international terminal to the domestic one…I knew I was doomed when I got there, didn’t even bother trying to go through the miles-long security line (because the four or five security experiences I had in Milan and Zurich this morning were of course insufficient…) (even though they confiscated and threw away my dangerous, threatening, terrifying, duty-free limoncello). 🙁
So, after drying my tears and calling Mark and telling him to not rush out to the airport to pick me up, I returned on the glacially slow tram to the international terminal, where SwissAir set me up with a nice hotel room here at the Hyatt and dinner, breakfast, and lunch vouchers–the internet is on me, though. Ah well.
And now I am practically hallucinating, and I can still feel the ground moving under my feet, and I think my brain thinks it’s 3am, and that bed looks awfully, awfully good.
But damn, I want to go home.
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*The perils of living in a Smaller City. There’s a jillion flights from Chicago to San Francisco; not so very many to Portland.