Road Trip 2024–the Return

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Our trip to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky went off without a hitch. There were some twists on the return, however.

The plan had been to return our rental car at the Cincinnati airport early afternoon on Monday July 16, and fly home to Ontario, with a brief stop and change of planes in Phoenix, Arizona. Early that morning, American Airlines notified me by text message that our flight was canceled. Not to worry, though. They had booked us on a later flight. Our new route would take us from Cincinnati to LaGuardia in New York. We would spend the night in the airport and catch an early morning flight nonstop from there to Ontario.

We were nonplussed at the thought of a night at LaGuardia, to say the least. I called American Airlines and accepted their statement that I could have them call me back, and that would happen in the order of calls received. My brilliant wife Kathryn did not accept that assertion. She called separately, and was speaking to a live representative before my callback came. They were perhaps twenty minutes into negotiations when my callback finally happened. At that point, they were far enough along that I just told my agent that my wife was on the line with another agent, and let them go.

After explaining that we were not open to spending a night in a big, dirty, busy, uncomfortable airport, Kathryn’s agent found a better solution for us. We would leave Cincinnati about an hour earlier than our original plan, and fly from there to Charlotte, North Carolina. After a brief stop and switch of planes, we would fly home to Ontario, arriving about an hour later than the original plane.

This still left us most of the day, so we packed and took it easy. We thought Kathryn might get cold on the flight at 35,000 feet. We went shopping and bought her a light fleece jacket, in case she wanted an extra layer. We dropped off the car with no problems, and found our departure gate. It turns out our new flight was delayed about an hour. No big deal.

We made it to Charlotte without incident, to find our next leg was also delayed. This gave us a little time to look around for something to eat, but not enough to actually find anything we wanted. We had “emergency provisions”: peanuts, cashews, and chocolate. We bought a couple bottles of water. There had been a lot of flights canceled, and would be many more over the next few days. Our flight had every passenger seat occupied, some by the requisite crying babies and the kid in the seat behind me who kept kicking the back of my seat. No big deal.

After takeoff, I put on my noise-canceling headphones and watched Wicked Little Letters, with Olivia Colman, which I had downloaded on to Netflix on my phone. Kathryn put on all her layers and took a nap.

Hours into the flight, somewhere over the central United States, Kathryn started nudging me urgently. I could not hear what she said, because of my headphones. I thought maybe she was pushing me back after I encroached on her in the seat. I repositioned myself, but she kept pushing at me. I took the headphones off, disoriented. She said she was going to pass out. I didn’t understand, but became alarmed. Was this a medical emergency? I turned on the call light for a flight attendant. Kathryn became unresponsive for about a minute. I undid her seat belt. A flight attendant arrived, and he suggested that Kathryn might just be overheated. He turned on the air nozzles and pointed them at her. With some difficulty, I got her new fleece jacket off and unzipped the nylon jacket she had on beneath it. The helpful crew member brought some iced orange juice, and Kathryn took a sip or two.

She quickly recovered. I told her how frightened I had become. It was not, in fact, but might easily have been, a big deal indeed.

The rest of the flight was uneventful. I left my headphones off and gave Kathryn all the attention she needed. We landed, picked up our checked bag, and took our Lyft home. It was a joyous, and only a little delayed, reunion with our dogs, cat, and plants.