When Cancelled Flights Are Fun

This last Friday night I was winding down from a long work week and getting ready to cook up some chicken parmesan when I got a voicemail. Normal people get calls but since my apartment is a black hole of reception, I get delayed voicemails. Anyway, I head outside to retrieve what little reception Wrigleyville has to offer to get a voicemail from Matt's mom in Kentucky. Apparently, Matt (who had been in Alaska all summer working) was supposed to have a connecting flight here in Chicago back home to Kentucky but it got cancelled. The kicker was that Matt was still in the air at that point in time and most likely had no idea. So I hopped on the train and went out to O'Hare to greet him. It was sort of like playing Where's Waldo in real life. Matt was connecting to a completely different airline entirely and had to switch terminals completely to iron out his logistics. Not only getting the time and boarding pass to his next flight but also figuring out if the 200 pounds of fresh Alaskan seafood he had caught up there was going to make it back with him. After hopping between terminals and playing a virtual game of Marco Polo, we finally met up and headed into town. Being that I happened to live in the city, there was no sense in him paying a couple hundred bucks on a last minute hotel room.

Knowing that the chicken parmesan could wait and that Matt is technically a tourist while he's in the city, we headed out to Giordano's for some deep dish. I actually hadn't even touched a Chicago-style pizza since the spring so I welcomed this meal with open arms. During the meal and briefly after we got back to my place of residency, he told me all about Alaska and we caught up on what had gone on with our individual lives since we last met up - which I think was May.

We both had to be up at five the next morning so there wasn't a lot of sleep involved in the visit. He had to get up to catch his early morning flight back home and I had my early morning 20 miler with the Nike Run Club. It's funny how some remarkably inconvenient times in our lives can end up being really cool ones.