The importance of being chill

My flight to Boston has left the gate and I'm not on it.

This is OK, because I didn't want to go to Boston at all; I want to get to Huntington Beach, Calif., which is closest to Santa Ana. The astute reader will note that Boston and California are, in fact, in opposite directions from Chicago. This was not lost on me, either, after American cancelled yesterday's flight to Santa Ana and rebooked me on this questionable itinerary, arriving at Los Angeles just before midnight, and getting me to Huntington Beach around 2am.

A creeping delay of the Chicago-Boston flight took me from a 55-minute connection at Logan to 32 minutes, then to 14 minutes, and then they called for more fuel. Refueling would take half an hour. My connection evaporated. So rather than spend the night in Boston, where I have no desire to be this week, I asked if the gate agent could help. She was able to find a seat on tonight's Chicago to Santa Ana flight. It's delayed, of course, but—and this is crucial—it's going to the correct airport.

And while this was going on, they were playing musical chairs on the airplane, because I had a first class seat that was now vacant. Several people got to move to better seats, pushing the open seat into the middle of the plane. The college student desperately trying to get home didn't care, because my exit turned her missed connection into mom picking her up at Logan instead of sleeping at O'Hare tonight.

I also discovered, to my mild disappointment, that the agent who let me into the Flagship Lounge earlier today may have bent a rule, but that is also OK. I'm in the regular lounge. It doesn't have free top-shelf liquor but does have a really tasty mushroom broth, which is a lot healthier for me.

So, it looks like I'll get to the conference hotel around 11:30 PDT tonight (cf. 2am!) and then go right to sleep.

Oh, another thing: for reasons I cannot fathom, the FAA has slapped both AA and UA hard on their oversaturation of O'Hare's airspace. Not that the brittle schedules of both airlines had anything to do with my travel issues this week...