This is for Aunt C

Despite my confidence, she was right all along that I couldn't make it through a trip without incident.

Friday morning my boss and I were boarding the plane to O'Hare, and I made a comment about always having bad travel luck but I was glad this trip was uneventful. That was a mistake.

We were in pullback (I had never heard of it until the pilot mentioned it-Cory told me that the plane can't go backwards unless they use reverse thrust, which is hard on the engines, so when you go backwards out of the gate they usually attach the plane to something to pull it away from the gate) when suddenly all the lights and air went out on the plane. I thought, "Hmm, that has never happened before". The pilot came on and said we had an electrical fault and lost all power. We went back to the gate to wait for mechanics, luckily hooked up to power at the gate. After about half an hour they called all the people with international connections and took them off the plane-I knew that wasn't a good sign that we would be leaving soon. After an hour of sitting there they finally de-boarded the entire plane. We got into the lobby and my boss said he was never traveling with me again.

We sat there waiting for the results of the test procedures for a few hours (since we only had a 50 minute layover in Chicago it was pretty obvious we weren't going to make it). We finally got called to the counter and the agent said "There is no way you are going to make it to South Bend today". Apparantly all later flights to South Bend were completely booked. We had a choice of flying to O'Hare that day and spending the night or spending another night in Orlando and flying in the morning. We chose to go later that day.

We finally got to O'Hare around 8:00 I think-over an hour and a half after I was originally supposed to be home. We convinced United to refund the portion of our flight from O'Hare to South Bend and rent us a car so we could drive. The next problem was they would not give us our luggage. They knew we had flights out in the morning, and they were giving us a hotel room for the night-but they wouldn't give us our luggage! I don't get it! They wouldn't even tell us if it was going out in the morning or if it had made it on the late flight to South Bend.

We got to South Bend around 11:30 and went into the terminal to return the car. It is a very small airport and the Avis counter was right next to the luggage carousel. There were people crowded around, and sure enough it was for the late flight from O'Hare. The carousel started as we were standing there, and sure enough there comes my luggage! I finally had some luck, was able to get my luggage that night, and made it home early Saturday morning.

Even with the stressful day Friday, I was really glad I was able to go. Certainly not for the weather-we had highs of 50's and all they talked about on the news while we were down there was problems with the crops freezing. I learned a lot at our meetings, and I was able to meet with their thermal performance person that I had talked to on the phone from work. I definitely think we will be able to work better together in the future after having met. They had 4 of their engineers from Germany come over (3 were PhDs) and they were really funny. They kept making comments like "We should review this chart later-with beer". I think it was funny because it was so stereotypical. All in all, a good experience. Now its back to single digits and "real" work on Monday!