- Nothing says “Let’s get ready to go on a trip!” like tornado warnings at midnight the night before you leave.
- We were OK, but our old neighborhood got tore up a bit.
- Nothing foreshadows how your day is going like leaving for the airport an hour before you absolutely have to and barely making it to your flight due to traffic.
- Is it a bad thing when the cause of the backup was two pickups being pulled onto a wrecker and a second wrecker with its cables running into the holler next to the interstate, all of which is bookended by a 50 foot rip in the guardrail?
- Gentlemen – It is a bad thing to mess up your wife’s birth date on her plane tickets. TSA has neither a sense of humor about such things, nor a willingness to help.
- Irish Woman had to go back to ticketing to fix it, then do her best O.J. Simpson impression to our gate, which was at the end of the furthest terminal from security. She made it, barely.
- I’m worried about what other O.J.-style skills she may be considering. Please note, if I am eliminated in a rather sticky manner this weekend, I deserved it.
- Irish Woman has joked that 1996 must be the birth year of my mistress. At least, I hope that was humor I saw in her eyes.
- We were supposed to have a two-and-a-half hour layover in Dallas, but due to weather, the pilot flew us to Dallas from Cincinnati via Kansas City and Laredo. We landed at about the time the doors for our next flight were closing.
- Being the seasoned travelers we are, we tried to get booked on the next flight to San Antonio, along with several hundred of our closest, newest friends.
- After standing in a line that wrapped around the terminal for 2 hours and moving a total of 30 feet, we decided that Plan B would not work, so we moved to Plan C – Rent a car and drive. Hey, it’s only a few hours between DFW and San Antonio, right?
- Arranging a rental car was relatively easy. Notice that I did not say inexpensive.
- Did y’all know how expensive a last-minute, one-way car rental is?
- Did y’all know that when you save money by prepaying for your car rental, you can’t get a full refund when you are no longer flying into the airport you originally planned on using and have to cancel?
- Getting our luggage out of the airline, open the other hand, was an adventure in and of itself. After… speaking… Yeah, that’s it, speaking with a small man with terror in his eyes about how we got our bags back, he put in a request to have them retrieved. He was brave enough to tell me it would take between 30 minutes and 3 hours to get them.
- Pro tip – When a customer says they no longer with to do business with your organization that day and would like their belongings returned to them, do not try to argue with them about how they can’t. That is especially true when the customer acknowledges that they will not be getting any sort of refund for the services your organization has not provided.
- The gentleman with the frightened eyes had an issue finding our luggage, because it had been rerouted in their system to be loaded onto a plane.
- American Airlines, may the brass allergy outbreak on the insides of their mothers’ thighs clear up soon, helpfully rebooked us on a flight the next day. Did I mention that they didn’t tell us about that?
- For some reason, Irish Woman used her Human Relations voice immediately afterward to talk to me about my people skills. Not sure where that came from.
- After securing our rental car from an adorably pleasant young woman, we went on “The Quest to Get Off of DFW” and find some food while the airplane minions gathered our baggage. It is at that point that I realized that I hadn’t eaten in 24 hours, and hadn’t had any coffee in almost 36. Suddenly, any bit of grilled critter slapped between two pieces of bread with a bit of tasty grease sounded good.
- Once we had acquired said greaseburgers and some bubbly caffeine, we retraced our steps back to the airport, all the while entertained by plumes of smoke emanating from the pits of Mordor, locally called DFW airport. After retrieving our luggage and playing “Rental Car Jenga” to get it all in the trunk, we repeated “The Quest to Get Off of DFW”, and headed south to San Antonio.
- We arrived in San Antonio after being on the road, in one way or another, for 18 hours. A quick query on my cell phone showed that it would only have taken 16 hours to drive. Taking into account the time to stop for gas and such every so often, it probably would have been about the same time to drive as do whatever it was that American Airlines did to get us sort of to our destination, and I would have had my own car and about $2000 still in my bank account. Lesson learned.
- After driving around San Antonio for a few hours today, I have to say that the Texas highway department doesn’t have a hair on their collective asses if they don’t partner with Mattel and paint all of those elevated highways orange.
- I told my soon-to-be son-in-law that there were no give-backsies with Girlie Bear. I think he thinks I’m kidding.
Rumblings
Posted by daddybear71 on April 4, 2025
https://daddybearsden.com/2025/04/04/rumblings-27/
3 Comments
DaddyBear
DaddyBear’s Den 
Old NFO
/ April 5, 2025The important thing is you and Irish Woman are THERE! The rest is extraneous (or will be in the future). Congrats to Girlie Bear!
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daddybear71
/ April 5, 2025Thanks, NFO. It was a good ceremony and party.
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Old NFO
/ April 5, 2025I would expect nothing less. 🙂
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