Tuesday, March 06, 2007

So, I promised to try and tell some tales about last weekend's trip to DC. We had planned to leave on Thursday morning, but our plane was leaving from Omaha and we had to be there at 7am, which meant that we needed to get up and get going from Lincoln early (our plan was to leave by 4:30am). I figured that seeing as how I am usually up until 2-3am anyhow, that I would just stay up and sleep on the plane. Around 3am, I looked outside and noticed that it was snowing, which kind of sucked, but I just decided I would go outside around 4am and brush the car off and shovel the driveway, so I climbed in the shower and by the time I got outside, it was coming down pretty hard. K got up around then and we tried to get off as soon as we could, but it ended up being 4:30 anyhow before we got out of the house. The roads going to the highway weren't terrible, but the snow on the highway was pretty bad. About 5 miles down the freeway, it was pretty apparent that we were going into full-blown white-out conditions, but we had already paid for a bunch of junk in DC (hockey games, hotel rooms, etc) so we figured we should just do our best to get to the airport in time and hope that they had delayed the morning flights enough that we could squeak on board before it left. K bravely drove through the snow, which just seemed to get worse as the trip went along and we ended up getting to Omaha about 20 minutes too late to even think about getting on the plane.

We spent about an hour trying to get this annoying ticket agent to book us on another flight, but she was just unhelpful. K was working the other counters and her parents were scanning the wires for any possible means to get out of Omaha, but in the end, they just started canceling every flight out of Omaha. It turns out that MN was also getting hit hard, so even if we had made the morning flight, we would have just been stuck in MN for a night, because nothing was really going out anywhere in the blizzard. Around noon, we had move through desperation and on to resignation - after 5 hours of trying to find some route out, nothing worked and we just gave up and had them book us to leave from Lincoln the next afternoon (which was the first flight out).

To add insult to injury, they had closed I-80, so we didn't have any real way to get home for several hours. By this point I had been awake for about 32 hours straight. We found a restaurant that was open at the mall in Omaha and sat it out for a bit while the road crew was clearing I-80. Then we hopped back on and drove as far as we could get before we hit another stretch that was closed down. Around 2pm we stopped at the outlet mall - about 1/3 of the way home or so - and slept in the car for a bit. By 4pm, they had I-80 cleared through to Lincoln, but they had plowed our entrance ramp closed, so we took a back route that was recently plowed and made it back onto I-80 about 15 miles down the road - and finally got home to Lincoln around 6pm. We couldn't get into the driveway - so K parked at the neighbors and shoveled, but the car got stuck backing out of their driveway, so around 6:30pm we finally managed to get the care into the driveway and could come in and watch what was left of the hockey game we were supposed to be watching from ice level. I was so exhausted, I fell asleep in the third period, but managed to wake up to see them score and make it into overtime.

Friday afternoon our plane was late leaving Lincoln, we missed our connecting flight, got moved to a later flight that was then about an hour and a half late leaving MN and got in to DC in time to miss all our scheduled events for the day.

Saturday we had plans to meet up with my boss for a little bit and talk shop, but we did manage to get off to the National Zoo, which was on the way towards our lunch meeting place. Turns out that the pandas were out and moving around - both the giant pandas and the red pandas - so we got some decent photos of them, which I am going to post now and then I will try to cover some of the other things we did in a later post. I will post some more panda photos in the next part that I write up about the trip.

Labels: life, panda

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