CES Wrapup

Trying desparately to get back home for Grant's birthday on Tuesday, I departed Las Vegas Monday morning with high hopes. The previous night I'd enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Wolfgang Puck's Trattoria del Lupo at Mandalay Bay. (Can someone please explain why Wolfgang's crotch is highlighted in the picture at the upper right corner of that link? It confuses me.)

It was seriously one of the best meals of my life...plus they had "donuts in a sack" on the menu for dessert. (Actually, they gave it some high and mighty Italian name, but any good Hoosier with at least one shoe would know that it was good old Fried Do-nuts, just like at the fair.) With a good meal under (and slightly hanging over) my belt, I boarded a plane bright and early Monday morning.

Earlier in the week, I had changed my flight home from a connection through Memphis to a flight arriving six hours earlier via Minneapolis. Now I know that Minneapolis in winter SEEMS like a bad idea, but they have some unbelievable snow removal gear at MSP, and I've actually never had any problems there. Everything proceeded very nicely until we began doing laps around the airport. Apparently they were alternating open runways in some sort of "plow, let planes land, close, replow" cycle, so they were far below their usual capacity.

After circling for an hour, the pilot came on and informed us that we were out of gas and would need to divert to Duluth. Duluth? Isn't that basically Canada? Crud. Half an hour later I'm sitting on the runway in Duluth, only moments after watching a pilot flying an Airbus A320 stand on the brakes in an effort to keep the plane from sliding off the end of the runway, through the bar, pizza parlor, city hall, and out the back end of Duluth.

One older woman was very excited to have gotten the world's first and last direct flight from Las Vegas to Duluth. She deboarded the plane, and I'm fairly sure she made an obscene gesture toward the rest of us as she did so. To Northwest Airline's credit, we got refueled and were back in the air within an hour.

Upon getting off the plane, I was handed a new ticket for the last flight of the night to Indy, arriving mere moments after my original flight via Memphis. Unfortunately, our pilot and crew were unable to get to the flight in time, so we took off a couple of hours late.

Our lateness and sub zero temperatures required our plane to go through the de-icing process once again, so it was really dang late before I left Minneapolis. After an uneventful flight to Indy, we landed at our lovely new airport, only to be greeted by a rather non-intellectual gate crew who decided that since our plane looked vaguely like a Delta plane and was parked at a Northwest gate, they should not let us off until Deputy Dan came down from the Northwest office to take a gander. Someone forgot to let these kindly employees know that the two airlines have merged.

After waiting yet ANOTHER half hour to get off the plane, I was on my way to baggage claim, inventing various new swear words in the process. After waiting for ANOTHER half hour at baggage claim, I saw the "Last Bag" sign light up and headed for the baggage claim office -- better known as the Island of Lost Underpants. As I began filling out my paperwork, a kind employee walked in and threw my bag on the floor a few feet away. "Somehow one bag from that last flight got onto the wrong carousel. Dunno how that could happen."

"Do the Northwest gate agents have anything to do with the baggage?" I inquired.

I scooped up my bag and headed home, a mere nine or so hours past schedule.

My co-workers found all of this highly entertaining, especially since many of them had opted to stick with the late night flight from Memphis. Perhaps next time they will get diverted to Tupelo as payback.