A very long day

Wednesday was a really up and down day. I got up ready to go for a bike ride and even though the weather looked not so great, out I went. But after around 3 miles I was just starting to think more and more that I was simply not enjoying myself, so I came back and walked around the lake instead.

One of my kids was supposed to fly home from the local airport in the afternoon, and the other kid and her boyfriend were due here around the same time. So I drove her over (around a half hour) and saw her through security and came back, where the others had arrived. And then about 45 minutes later I got a text from her saying they were having a mechanical problem and there was no mechanic on site. So they had to cancel the flight because the mechanic was at another airport 2 hours away and I had to go back and get her.

The stupid part was that there was another flight arriving later and the plane was then returning to Boston. They could have gotten on, but thanks to our Republican friends in Congress and their budget cuts, TSA couldn't authorize the overtime to keep someone on staff there, even though they had all already cleared security. Apparently someone has to stay and watch them.

When I arrived, Joann, the sole airline (Cape Air) employee, was trying to help 3 people at once. My daughter was the only person just going to Boston. Everyone else was missing connections, including someone traveling on frequent flyer miles to Amsterdam. If you've never had missed connections on a rewards ticket, count yourself as lucky. Because the canceled flight was not part of the award ticket, Delta wanted to charge them $6000 for new tickets. It only got worked out because Joann from Cape Air had the bright idea to call her colleague in Boston and have them personally walk over to the Delta office and work it out.

As for my daughter, they first wanted to put her in a van to Boston (which the people who missed the Amsterdam connection took), but ultimately they paid for a taxi to Plattsburgh this morning and a flight from there on another commuter airline. So she’s back in Boston finally.

So we arrived back at the house tired and cranky. I got on my bicycle and rode for an hour on a beautiful clear late afternoon, and then had my Favorite Fifteen, which was a swim across the lake. It's only about a third of a mile round trip, but I'm not really a swimmer. I mean, I can swim okay, but I don't do a lot of swimming for exercise and open water swimming is much harder than swimming laps. I'd wondered if I could make it, and I did with surprisingly little trouble.

I guess I do enough endurance exercise that even if I'm not an efficient swimmer I can keep going. I made sure to stop a couple of times on the way to just look around at where I was, there in the middle of the lake. The weird thing is that there's a law in New York that if you go out on a boat you need a life jacket, so everyone in kayaks or on SUPs had life jackets on. But I could swim without one. Does that make any sense? They are out there with a floating thing and I am not, yet they are the ones who need the life jackets.

At this point I was no longer tired and cranky, so we went out to dinner and had some very good Bar-BQ with pretty atrocious service. Still it was fun. And again the evening ended with some Olympics. So it ended up okay.