Happy New Year

It is good to be back. On December 28th, my wife and I flew out to Knob Noster, Missouri (pronounced Mis-er-y) to visit daughter#2 and son-in-law #1. I call him son-in-law #1 because they married first and Daughter #1 is married to son-in-law #2. I know it sounds confusing but this is the South and we have strange family trees in many places, particularly Alabama.



While in Missouri, we stayed in the hotel at Whiteman AFB, and for just $32 a night it was a nice suite. While my daughter and her husband love it out there, I felt the hotel was the highlight of the city of Knob Noster. I lived in Malden, Missouri 16 years ago, which is in the bootheel of the state and it was much like Knob (as the locals call it)--surrounded on all sides by soybean fields, wheat and milo. The closest town with a Wal Mart is 25 miles away and the closest town with a mall is Independence--nearly an hour away.



We left our home in Cleveland, Tn and drove 2 hours to Nashville for a flight on SouthWestern because it was nearly $300 cheaper than flying out of Chattanooga just 15 miles South of us. The flight was scheduled to leave at 8:45PM and we arrived at the airport the required 2 hours early, only to find out that the flight was already delayed 30 minutes at that time due to connecting flights from the north.



We checked our luggage, and muddled our way through security--never carry on your CPAP machine--check it and save the hassle. I had been told to take the CPAP out of my bag. I thought they meant the carryon bag. They meant the zipper bag it is in. So after I took the CPAP bag out of my carry on and placed it on the conveyor belt they stopped it in the middle of the X-ray machine and called for a hand search.



A specialist came over and he was wearing rubber gloves. You can imagine my relief when I found out he only had to hand search my bag and not me. After he hand searched the bag, he swabbed the maching for explosive residue and then dumped the contents into a bin and ran it back through the X-ray machine again. I was then allowed to get the bin and try to stuff the contents back into the zipper bag and the zipper bag into my carry on while at the same time, trying to put my shoes back on and keep from getting run over by the others coming through the line.



Once all my personal belongings were back on and we were on our way to the terminal gate, I was ready for a drink. To my good fortune, there was a full bar across from our gate. I left my wife at the only two seats available at the next gate down from ours and stood in line twenty minutes to pay $11 for two beers. We drank our beers and then they called the flight before ours and that opened seats up at our own gate, so we moved over there.



On the way, I noticed that our flight was now 45 minutes delayed. Terriffic, I thought. Now we would not arrive until 11:30 and it was two hours from Kansas City to Knob, where the Air Force Base was. Then the nice man came on the loud speaker and asked us to move five gates down the terminal where we would be delayed another 30 minutes.



As we walked to the new gate, there were people in the floor, laying down and sleeping, reading or playing games. Things did not look good for us to get there on time. And since we had guaranteed late arrival at the hotel, we paid whether we arrived or not. It seemed that the cities of Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore were causing the delays since they had so much snow, the planes kept having to be de-iced. At 11:30, our flight was finally called--two hours late--and we boarded the plane.



Southwestern has a unique way of boarding. There are no assigned seats, you are seated according to your boarding passes, which are labled A-B-or C and 1-30 or 31-60. My wife and I were B23 and B 22, so we had a good choice of seats. When we went down the aisle, we saw three seats open on the right wing. Two of the seats were turned over but I brilliantly told my wife that they must have been where the two child seats I saw a man carry off were. We turned the seats over, sat down and buckled up. Another man sat in the aisle seat.



Just before takeoff, the steward (male flight attendant?) came by and said "You sat in the broken seats? Oh well, don't worry about it." He went on down the aisle toward the cabin. A few minutes later the head stewardess came to our seats and informed us that we would have to get out of the broken seats and take the only two remaining seats on the plane. Since my wife and the man in the aisle seat were in the broken seats, we decided to let him have my seat and we moved. Her to the very back of the plane and me to the middle--twenty rows apart. This flight was beginning to wear on me.



After we arrived in Kansas City at 1:30 AM, I noticed the tarmac was covered with a sheet of ice. Had I known that, I would have been praying harder. (The next day, my son-in-law's mother, who also happened to pick the same week as us to visit, informed me that a plane had went off the runway the night before) It was 3:30 before we checked into the hotel. I was ready for bed, and fell to sleep immediately. Tomorrow, I will describe our wonderful visit with our kids.

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