"Traveling Is Never a Boring Olympic Event!" - Time Out #132

After staying in Our Town for almost 6 months, my bride, Ms. Debbie, and your humble correspondent, decided once again to venture out of our nest-of-rest. We re-visited my bride's city of birth and first 32 years of her life, San Diego. Official chosen nickname, "America's Finest City", San Diego, once again, was a wonderful experience for our duo, as it has been many times.

This particular installment is not about our 5 days there, but merely about our 6th day when we began our trek back to Our Town.

What an experience, and, in retrospect, certainly not one for the faint of heart!

Our journey back began on the same Wednesday (2.21) Our Town experienced the hazardous rain, ice, fog and freezing weather conditions. With very little/none moisture for the winter up until then,as fate would have it, we would be returning from our latest San Diego traveling experience when winter was displaying all her magic tricks at one time,

As we were departing our hotel in San Marcos, CA, about 40 miles northeast of San Diego's Lindbergh Field (SAN) airport, my bride showed me a cell phone text she had just received from our airline carrier, American Airlines (AA). It stated our late evening flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth (DFW) to Our Town was canceled 10 hours ahead of time, due to the expected harsh winter weather conditions.

This was disappointing to us, but we thought we would have several hours in advance to figure out our Plan B, which is always required when traveling.

However, we were so distracted by the airline change, we made a big boo-boo at the time, discovered later, as you will read.

From our hotel, it took about 45 driving minutes in the never-small Southern California I-5 highway traffic to arrive at the huge rental car facility. After we unloaded our rental car, my bride asked me "Where is the small black suitcase?"

Not the best question for my ears to hear.

Yes, dear friends, the luggage in question was left in our hotel driveway loading area as we drove off toward the airport. We were still soaking in the canceled flight information in our heads; not good to be mentally distracted.

Two quick cell phone calls to 1) the hotel front desk---yes, they had our suitcase, and 2) Debbie's youngest sister, Rachelle, who said she would pick it up, and mail it to us. That part was good; what wasn't good was our home keys and truck keys, parked at our convenient Stillwater airport (SWO), were inside the missing suitcase. Oh, well, now we have to come up with Plan C. Never a dull moment?

Next, we are off to the San Diego AA ticket counter, and their long lines, to talk with a person about our dilemma. This entire process from start to finish took about an hour, but we came up with flying from DFW to Tulsa (TUL), since SWO was not available, and the flights to Oklahoma City (OKC) were sold out. We were booked for the final flight of the day, arriving in TUL about 11 p.m. At that time in San Diego it was noon, so you can see, our travel day was becoming longer and longer..Also, now we will have to secure a rental car in Tulsa for a one-way rental drive to Our Town.

Our flight from SAN to DFW was over an hour late, but that did not cause us scheduling problems, because we had 5-hour layover in DFW before leaving for TUL. The flight to TUL did happen, though, which we were not sure it would happen with all the adverse weather in Our State that day.

We finally arrived in Tulsa around midnight, and we quickly traveled to the car rental counter to secure a 4-wheel drive Jeep for our 70-mile driving adventure to Our Town. It certainly was NOT our average drive, as the Tulsa area highways were almost without vehicles, and most of the big rigs were parked on the side of the roads. Yes, ice everywhere!

We persisted, however, even when our "overheated" engine light came on our instrument panel half way along on the Cimarron Turnpike. Fortunately, I correctly estimated it was a instrument malfunction, since I did not see any smoke, etc, coming from our engine in the 1:30 a.m. frigid outside air.

Arriving in our neighborhood, as is normal in icy weather conditions, the secondary streets were really treacherous; our home driveway area was an absolute ice rink. My bride even had to scoot on her derriere across the icy concrete to the area we thought our hidden house key was located. Unfortunately, she was unable to find it due to all the ice. I did, however, manage to get a nice photo of her scooting efforts to document it forever!

Trying to leave our neighborhood took us almost 20 minutes to go 1 block, not due to the ice on the street as I had thought, but due to in the chaos of the situation, I had managed to press the car's parking brake button. Yes, it is noisy and not efficient when a 4-wheel drive vehicle attempts to go anywhere with its parking brake engaged. It is especially a loud problem in one's neighborhood at 3 a.m. on a frigid winter evening.

Our story does have a good ending, dear readers.

Once I disengaged the parking brake, we drove out to Our Airport, and we called the wonderful On-Star service. Our helpful On-Star representative sent the satellite signal to unlock our ice-covered truck. My bride used her Herculean strength against the ice to get our passenger door broken open, and secured our sought-after home keys inside our truck.

One more trip back home, unlocking our front door, and collapsing in our wonderful warm bed as our clock read 4 a.m.

That's my story, and I am sticking to it

Wow........