Travel Diary

Well, Tuesday was the day I had planned on heading home. I had a flight booked and a good deal on. It was $185, but I used a $50 coupon, so it was really $135, and for a flight that long, it was a really good deal – if I had actually been out to get on the plane.

I woke up at 4:30am. I'm usually trying to get to the airport an hour before a flight with some risk. And this time, I wouldn't exactly consider it a flaw in my methodology, but there's some things you just cannot control. And even if I left an hour and a half before the flight or two hours before the flight, I still might not have made it.

Well, I might have if we had beaten the accident. But there was an accident. A big one.

So at one point, a couple of miles down the highway bordered by swamp land, the fog had come in and mixed with some fire smoke. And it just made visibility really, really bad. I mean, just pretty much zero. And that led to an accident. People often go too fast in these conditions. And if they do, they just end up in fatal accidents, which is very unfortunate. But people just have to learn how to drive in such conditions. So, yeah, things came to a slow down and then a stop and then well, it just became a crawl for the next three hours.

At some point, I pretty much had to call the airline and cancel my flight because I was not going to be getting on that plane. There was zero chance. They put me on the next plane, which was at 9:30am (it was about 6:30am then.) I figured I had plenty of time for that, although they charged me an extra $350 or something. So my flight became roughly $480, which wasn't an obscene price, but nothing I could do about it.

However, the traffic just did not move. It was just stop and go with like 5 to 10 minutes of stops with zero movement. So this was really bad, and time kept ticking. At some point, I booked a flight for the next day at 7am, just to make sure I had something locked in (I would cancel for a refund if I didn’t need it). And then later on I just had to call once again and cancel that second flight, as I wouldn't even make my 9:30 flight.

The flight after that would have cost me close to $700. And well, that wasn't ideal either.

I had thought about maybe just going to New Orleans and then getting a hotel room and staying there so my friend wouldn't have to drive out again the next day. But he said I could stay at his house another night. So I said, Yeah, why not. Plus, it was more time to hang out with friends and chat. So it was actually kind of a blessing in disguise in some ways.

At some point, we reached the accident and you could tell it was pretty bad. It looked like there could have been survivors, although I think it was another accident up the road which might have had the one fatality. So yeah, someone did lose their life in this whole disaster. Yet the vehicles I saw looked like those people could have survived. Hard to say. I didn’t know. Nevertheless, it also seemed like, from the looks of the accident, that people must have been just going way too fast in the zero visibility conditions.

We were forced to kind of get off the freeway, go to the other side, because they had closed the other direction of the freeway as well. It was a nightmare for everyone commuting that morning. Everyone was being rerouted south and just kept driving right back to Slidell. So we didn't even reach New Orleans.

And pretty much four hours after we had left, we returned back to the same place. Nothing was accomplished, but we had to give it a try. You never know what's going to happen, but I guess you just had do have to check Google Maps and just keep really updated because there was lot of people still in those lines and I just thought, man, they're going to be there for quite a long time.

Back at the house, my friend had to go to work, but I was able to just relax. That's all I wanted to do. So I studied the Spanish for a while, got to hang out outside, got try to do a little tanning, though that wasn't too easy. I thought I might have been getting bitten by ants or something. I don't know. I gave that up, had a beer or two and just relaxed. At one point I thought I would just take a nap. However, I then I got a text saying my friend's work had been canceled. So he was headed back. Okay, we'll just hang out a while, but then everything changed when a lost dog came walking by.

This dog came up and was a really nice, friendly dog. Taking care of her was something that changed the rest of the day.

The dog did have a collar on, but no tags and just no sign of any owner. We put a leash on it and just walked around the neighborhood, trying to locate the owner. Having no luck, we went to a place where they could measure for a chip, but no chip. So the poor dog didn't have a home, but it was so friendly. She was such a nice, sweet dog. And you didn't want to take it to a pound or anything like that. But at some point, my friend's wife said they just could not take the dog in.

And it made sense. They require too much time and attention. So you just can't have a dog when you're always away from it.

But we did have places to be. We had to get to Buffalo Wild Wings to have dinner, so they put the dog in their laundry room and we took off. The buffalo wings were great. I don't know if I'd ever been there before either.

Yeah, I guess. I don't think I just ever had gone to a Buffalo Wild Wings before, and it's a fun experience. Just got to be careful if you order the hot ones, because they definitely are very hot and they will just burn your tongue in mouth to where you really can't taste anything from that point forward. A few beers helped, but I was still on fire for quite some time.

After that, we headed back home and the dog, being kind of scared or whatever, scratched up the door to the laundry room and tore up some cardboard or whatever items she could find. She was a little panicky, but was now happy people were back home again, though my friends realized this was going to be a problem having it in there overnight.

So they got a kennel they borrowed from Jim’s son and that helped, I think. The dog was a little panicky at first, but finally relaxed. And I guess the damage was mitigated at that point. No more clawing everything up. (Note: a day later, the owner was found and the dog was happily reunited.)

So there was no more football to watch that evening since it was Tuesday. But we watched some episodes of Yellowstone and people got tired pretty fast. I stayed up until near midnight, and I said goodbye to my friend Tonya for a second time. I got some rest, and four hours later, I had to be awake in order to be heading home again.