“Give me ya confirmation number please,” the weary Delta employee with the crooked name tag reading “Yolanda,” said with a yawn. “Give me a break!” my husband quipped back. Yolanda’s eyes narrowed warily as she squinted at my phone until she looked up at the sound of him laughing. She laughed too. “Ms. Warner,” she said with a Georgia drawl, “I like ‘im, you should keep ‘im a’roun’! ” I laughed too as we got down to the serious business of figuring out how to get to Logan airport, even though all flights to and from were suspended due to a snowstorm.

We thought we had figured it out 5 hours ago back in Charleston, when the text cancelling our flight and rescheduling us for the next day had me on the phone, reluctantly agreeing to fly from Charleston to Atlanta, Atlanta to Richmond, Richmond to Boston, arriving some 14 hours after we’d started out, but at least on the same day. Hustling around the hotel room as soon as I’d hung up to quickly pack since our new flight was scheduled to leave in less than two hours, we checked out, google mapped our way to the car rental place, remembering to fill it up with gas first, took a shuttle to the airport and made it through security without incident. Well, not without having my bag searched as it almost always is, this time I think the culprit was my AirPods, which kept “showing something electronic, but I don’t know what it is, must be my imagination,” the bored agent shrugged, giving up after the third failed attempt. He gave me a once over, and apparently deciding I didn’t look like a criminal, waved me on.

Happily we flew to Atlanta, our carry-on bags having been checked for free as the flights were full, something that I did not like that my husband had agreed to at all, as I knew for a fact they would not be waiting for us in Boston.”You’re not the one who has to stuff them in the tiny overhead bin, then get them out again on three different planes today,” he huffed. Since he graciously did not add that the bags were overstuffed  because I always overpack and insist on bringing five pounds of beauty products, multiple shoes and clothes for every sort of weather event, I reluctantly agreed for the second time that day. “Well, at least let’s get our bag of medications out of them, just in case,” I said. Sighing, he proceeded to rifle through six days of dirty clothes, annoyance increasing with every second. “I thought you said you were putting them in your backpack,” he grumbled. “No! I told you that I couldn’t fit them in there and asked you to put them in your bag! Oh! Just forget it then, if it’s that much trouble!” Apparently finding it to be too much trouble, he closed the bags, and wheeled them away, which would be the last we saw of them for four days.

Quarrel temporarily forgotten, we complimented each other on our travel skills, and ability to roll with the punches, until we checked in at the kiosk at our first lay-over and learned that our flight from Richmond to Boston had now been cancelled as well. Knowing we’d have a much better chance of finding something out of Atlanta, the busiest airport in the world, instead of tiny Richmond, we sidled up to the nearest counter and met Yolanda.

Fresh from our vacation in Charleston, where manners include kindness and consideration of others, not just please and thank you, and still in an expansive vacation mode mood, and never ones to take our frustrations out on anyone but each other, we waited patiently while she tried to get us home… “I have a 2:30 direct to Boston…but it’s delayed until 8 pm. Oh wait, that’s full. I have a 6:30 pm to Boston…but it’s delayed until 1 am, tomorrow. But, you’d be confirmed on that flight,” our smiles faded as we looked at the time and realized that meant 15 more hours in this airport, a three-hour flight to Boston, a shuttle bus to pick up our car, and a four-hour drive home, meant we would be getting home about 24 hours later. Portland and Manchester had no available flights, so my husband suggested Hartford. There was a flight available. “No way! How would we get to Boston to get our car?!?” “A bus,” he nodded confidently to himself. “Yup, that’s what we’ll do. You need to trust me on this.” Well, I didn’t trust him on this, not one little bit. My life? Absolutely. Eventually getting home in one piece? Sure. Making us take the most frustrating and least convenient way to get there? Yup, I did trust that. Yolanda and I looked at each other, a bond of sisterhood and understanding flowed one to another other like a rainbow. We knew we were thinking the same thing. Sighing, I indicated that we would take the flight to Hartford. She continued to look at me, and the long meaningful stare was not lost on me, “okaayyy, Miss Susannah, but if this don’t work out goooddd… ” we smiled at each other, and with new tickets in our hands, my husband and I started to walk away when Yolanda called out…. “Kev-in! Kev-in! I like her, you need to keep her a’roun’!”

I’d love to report that we flew off to Hartford, caught a bus to Logan, a shuttle to our car at the hotel, and sang songs all the way home while recounting our adventures in Charleston, arriving on the same day we set out. Alas, as any traveler knows, especially ones who are fortunate enough to travel with a spouse, particularly one that you’ve known for decades, such is rarely the case. I’m afraid that despite our initial glee at having been bumped up to first class by the kind Miss Yolanda (those little water bottles just waiting for me! The little pillow! the blanket! maybe even a free glass of wine when we took off!), our smiles turned upside down, as the pilot announced that “we are experiencing a mechanical issue, I’m afraid all passengers will need to disembark the aircraft.”

With a vague sense of relief that the Hartford scheme was now foiled, and with newly found hope, I marched down the aisle and straight up to another ticket agent while all the other passengers were wearily grabbing their bags from the overheads. As I was in first class, I was the first one in line to present our compounding problem.”Well,”  he said smiling into the computer screen, “looks like I can get you on a 6:30 direct flight to Boston!” I was so relieved that we didn’t have to go to Hartford, I didn’t even think about the fact that Miss Yolanda had already told us that this flight was delayed until 1 am. Gratefully we took our new tickets, rushed down the hall, took two escalators down, hopped on a subway, and headed to the gate, arriving there 20 min before it was time to board. But too late, because by this time, the Bickersons had arrived and they were not going to leave until we pulled into our driveway (which ended up being at 3 am). I’m sorry to say that the Bickersons further stepped up their game upon discovering that our new flight would not be leaving for another 7 hours and would necessitate more subway rides and another long, silent, arms crossed walk to the now changed gate.

At some point during the long trek (according to my Fitbit, I walked six miles in that airport!), Mrs. Bickerson took it upon herself to ask another agent if she and sulky Mr. Bickerson could be placed on standby for the 2:30, now 8 pm direct flight to Boston, which, much to Mr. Bickerson’s annoyance, prompted a turnaround and another subway ride to the new gate. Approaching the desk of the fifth Delta employee of the day, I swapped my Mrs. Bickerson scowl for a Susie sunshine face and inquired politely if the odds were in our favor. With 48 others on standby, it appeared unlikely until a quick search of our names revealed that miraculously we were in “the top-tier.” “What does that mean?” I asked stunned. “Well, Ma’am, that means you’re third on the list.” Thanking him out loud, and Miss Yolanda in my head for getting us in the toptier by bumping us up to first class, I looked around at the 48 other tired/mad faces. A little boy crying beside me caught my attention, and I knew before I even heard her say it, that this frightened mother with two fretful little boys, was also hoping to be called. “It’s ok, it will be alright. We will be together, don’t worry, we will get seats together.” Always one to think of quotes from movies and books, I was unpleasantly reminded of Titanic, when the poor Irish mother tells her children that as soon as the first class passengers were safe, that they would be let go. “Well, this is a fine kettle of fish,” I thought. “We can’t steal their seats!” But, as I gazed sadly at her, Mr. Bickerson’s face came into focus, and I shamefully thought, “well, maybe we can.”

I should have known that God had other plans; plans that did not force me to confront my conflicting survival/beast mode vs. Christian /nurse battle raging inside of me. Thankfully six of us; weary mom, weepy little boys, surly Bickersons, and one sulky teenage girl managed to get seats. We were the only ones out of almost 50 others, and we felt like we’d won the lottery, a sentiment I actually exclaimed aloud until I was hushed by a still crotchety Mr. Bickerson. Several of the other stand-by passengers actually clapped when the moms name was called; although not one clapped for the Bickersons, least of all Mr. Bickerson. They didn’t clap for the teenager either, so that made me feel a little bit better. Exhausted, hungry and stressed, Mr. B was suffering from an intense craving for a cigarette, although he’d quit smoking five months ago. Hours earlier, Mr. B had actually succumbed to the call of nicotine and, having left Mrs. Bickerson at a TGIF with a mai tai in her hand, disappeared into the Atlanta terminal abyss, where he was not seen or heard from until an hour later, which is actually how long it took him to take four escalators, two shuttles and to go through security AGAIN. Apparently, his 10 minute fall from grace also involved a discussion partly in Spanish with a prisoner who had been released days earlier and assumed Mr. B was Puerto Rican (?!?). But I digress… Needless to say, Mr. B was met with a stone faced Mrs. B; mai tai long since consumed and its potential soothing effects turned inside out. Even the story of the spanish speaking jail-bird who was looking for his “lady” and a couple of bucks, did little to assuage her disappointment. Mr. B, having bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time since October, felt little joy at the site of the smoker’s roo, inside the terminal the B’s noticed on the way to one of their gates, in fact it seemed to make his agitation worse. And so it was with relief , when we finally boarded the plane headed North, that Mrs. B. sunk into a middle seat, Mr. Bickerson a row behind me.

The next seven hours did not improve the Bickersons mood much. Not after the 3.5 hour flight, not while discovering the bags were in Richmond, as were our medications; mine, for headaches, his for mood :/. No improvement while waiting for the shuttle to take us to the hotel in the freezing Boston weather, our blood having thinned by the short stay in the south. In fact, tensions reached the boiling over level, by the time the Bickersons had been dropped of at their vehicle by the russian speaking van driver, and found it covered in a foot of snow and ice, but curiously with the passenger’s side cleared off, and snowy footprints on the floor mat. Wasting no time to find out why this was so, Mrs. B started the car, while Mr.B, aggressively cleared the snow and chipped away at the ice, obscenities flying as wildly as the snow. A quiet and reflective ride home from Boston in the middle of the night, gave Mrs. B plenty of time to wonder if traveling was actually worth it; the cost, the bickering, the swearing, the crossed arms, the inconvience…As we neared our home, we tentatively started talking again. First, about practical matters… Would our son have shoveled the driveway (he did), then about the funny things (Puerto- Rican!), and we laughed. We remembered the laughter, the fun, the experiences, the people, the food, the sites, and we knew that we’d made more memories. Like a savings account, we’ve stored these things up in our minds and in our hearts, and even though the Bickersons make exorbitant withdrawals at times, the Warners know that they could never truly bankrupt them, they’re just part of the experience, and an experience is always worth having, even knowing that the Bickersons are coming too.