Our blogs have been delayed, as we have been distracted lately. The cold spell that this blog describes is now gone, but the memory and frustrations it brought are still part of our traveling story . . .
While we were watching the temperatures plummet here in the Rio Grande Valley, we were also anxiously watching the weather in Houston. Months ago we purchased airplane tickets so we could make a very important trip back to the cold north. Our oldest son and his wife had scheduled a winter ski trip, and we were the designated baby-sitters while they were away. While their weather was cold and they had some new snow, their flights out of Kansas City to the Colorado ski mountains were all on schedule for the ski trip. But we were very sad to see that our flights from South Texas through Houston and on to Kansas City were cancelled!
We would spend the next two days looking through flight options and on the telephone to United Airlines to try to find a way to get to Kansas City on time. We booked a new flight--only to see it got cancelled. We booked a third flight--only to see that it was cancelled. We looked into driving to Houston and booked a fourth flight out of Houston--only to see it got cancelled. We tried routes flying through Denver or Charlotte, but we found that the only way out of the tip of Texas is through Houston or Dallas--and both those airports were closed!
We made preparations to make the 16-hour drive to Kansas City, but we found the highways iced over and closed between here and there. In fact, the Texas Department of Transportation web site showed that the roads were impossible!
We were glad that the other set of grandparents had a vehicle that would make it through the snowy roads at their home near Oklahoma City. Once out of that snow, the roads were clear for their five-hour drive to Kansas City so the ski trip wasn't ruined. We couldn't get our flight through Houston for another couple days because now everything was overbooked. What a travel mess! This is the first time we have flown since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. It is certainly a pain to wear a mask the entire time we were in the airport and the airplane--that's over 7 hours of masking up. As we flew into Houston, we were looking for the snow that caused all our delays. We didn't see any snow left on the ground below us.
What we could see was the brown smog that settled in over the entire city. The downtown skyscrapers were barely visible through the smog.
In the first picture, we could see an airplane flying beside us. As we lowered in altitude, so did that airplane.
It looks like they are landing at the same time, hopefully on a different runway at the very busy Houston International Airport!
After two very uneventful flights--just the way we like them--we landed in Kansas City around 10 p.m. Our originally booked flight was supposed to get us here on Tuesday, and we finally arrived on Saturday night. Who would have ever thought that we would have such a hard time flying out of our tropical home this winter, as we arrived to our destination four days late!
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