Home, sweet home!

After a weekend trip to Chicago, man, am I ever glad to be home.

I wonder if some force is trying to make me return to the Midwest and stay there. Why, you ask? Well, read on ...

My fiancé and I traveled to Chicago this past weekend to attend a wedding. We were flying to Chicago on Friday, and had a layover in the city where I used to live. The flight from San Francisco was uneventful (even though we had to wake up at an ungodly hour to make the flight). We flew in over my old neighborhood, and I have to admit I got a bit teary-eyed as I saw some familiar landmarks. I even took some digital pictures from my window seat. After an hour or so for the layover, we were up in the air again for the 50-minute continuing flight to Chicago.

We were about 15 or 20 minutes into the short flight when the pilot came over the intercom to tell us we had to turn around and return to the airport because of a problem with the landing gear! Thankfully, the problem wasn't with the gear coming down in the landing position, but with the gear staying up.

We landed back safely at the airport, but we wondered if the problem wasn't with the landing gear in the down position, why couldn't we continue on for another 30 minutes or so to O'Hare? The pilot said it was better to be safe than sorry.

After missing our first rebooked flight due to horrible customer service and poor communication by the airline agents, we finally made it to Chicago after traveling for more than 12 hours. (I could have flown to Asia in the same period of time. Geesh!)

On our way home, we hit terrible traffic trying to get to O'Hare airport, ran into a slow-ass Hertz trainee (he actually asked for our discount coupon, something the employees never usually do) when trying to return our rental car and equally slow shuttle buses to the terminal, missed checking into our flight home by three minutes (and we weren't the only ones, mind you), had to fly standby for the connecting flights home (anxiously waiting for our names to be called by the agents for boarding passes, while at the same time wishing evil on the other unfortunate passengers on the standby list), and finally made it on the last San Francisco flight for the day.

Luckily, all of us in the group that had missed our original flight home were able to get on the last flight, even though it had been oversold by five seats. As we all lined up on the jetway waiting to board, we grinned happily at each other. While the whole flying standby process seemed cutthroat, we were all relieved to see everyone would make it home that night. Whew!