Christmas in Iowa Part 1

Meet Me in St. Louis (12/20/07)
The day started okay. We finished packing and took the boys to the vet for boarding. (Very sad…but they were well taken care of) Joan picked us up and we hit the airport in plenty of time to catch our flight. Everything went great…until we got to St. Louis.
We got off the plane and found that our flight to Cedar Rapids was cancelled due to heavy fog in Iowa. (we later found out that pretty much the whole state of Iowa was shut down) We then proceeded to the red phones (Holy Crap, Batman!) to talk to someone about an alternative. Their first suggestion was that they didn't have anything until Saturday. My strong suggestion back was they they'd better try again. Our alternative ended up being to catch a puddle-jumper w/ Great Lakes Aviation (yeah, I’d never heard of it either) on Friday at 11:10 am to Burlington, Iowa, meaning that her parents now have to drive 2 hours to pick us up rather than half an hour. ur next step was to try to find our luggage. Well, that was the biggest mistake of all. They had no idea where our luggage was. It was so frustrating to talk to those stupid, rude people. At one point, the stupid, rude person told us that our luggage probably went on to Cedar Rapids since that was our final destination. I asked her how our luggage was going to get there if we couldn't. She had no answer. We almost jumped in a rental car with a guy named Jason and his wife to drive to Cedar Rapids but at the last minute we decided to stay hoping we could sort out the luggage crisis. We finally found a very nice American employee (the only freakin’ one) named Earl and he treated us right. We got a hotel for the night and he assured us that our luggage had been marked to be aboard the plane tomorrow.
So we got a 50% discount (act of God) at the Westport Sheraton. We had a luxurious dinner at McDonald’s (actually it was pretty dang tasty), watched some cable TV and went to bed.