Traveling during snow season = not fun

Or, perhaps I should have titled this post: "101 reasons why automated, voice-recognition phone systems have driven me to the brink of insanity tonight." My wife and I were supposed to fly back to Utah tonight to visit family for the holidays. Mother Nature had something to say about that: "I'm sorry...please try again tomorrow."

You see, back when I booked our flights a few months ago, I thought I was pretty smart to notice the 45-minute layover in Minneapolis in the suggested itinerary and swap the first flight of the trip for an earlier one that would give us a 3.5 hour layover instead. "Sure, 3.5 hour layovers are rotten," I thought, "but you can never have too much slush time built into the schedule when flying in December." As it turns out, it would have been better to avoid Minneapolis altogether, since the layover is rather irrelevant when the flight is canceled.

In trying to get alternative travel plans figured out, I spent a lot of "quality time" on Northwest's voice-recognition automated phone system. Between the annoyance of the system mistaking the announcements in the terminal for my response to its questions, to spending more than an hour on hold this evening for nothing, I've had my fill of it. The worst part is that it's nearly impossible to skip the prompts and talk to a real person. I really dislike systems that "work" like that.

After the long, stressful afternoon and evening, the good news is that we have a direct flight to Salt Lake City tomorrow. Unfortunately, it departs from Kansas City International Airport at 5 pm. So, we'll be leaving after sacrament meeting tomorrow morning to pick up a rental car from the airport here in St. Louis to drive the approximately 4 hours to the Kansas City airport.

At least we get to sleep in tomorrow morning...