Las Vegas Airport had a snow day! I know because my father was meant to fly home to Memphis after a mileage run of his own this week. There are worse places to be stranded, especially in a snowstorm. The dry (that is, alcohol-free) airport in Johor Bahru comes to mind straightaway, as does Portland, Maine, where they roll up the carpets come 9:00 p.m. Then again, getting home from the airport when there’s bad weather is no easy task, either.
When I was five, my mother and I set out from upstate to fly from JFK to Los Angeles. My father left the day before, and we were meeting him there. As we rode the bus down the Thruway, it started to snow. And snow. And really, really, snow. By the time we arrived at the airport, JFK was a mess; all of the flights were cancelled, and the airport was rapidly becoming last-chopper-out-of-Saigon situation. This was in the days when they were serious about shutting down the airports, instead of greedily keeping fliers on the airplane during delays while charging them for blankets and food. I wonder if they let you run a tab?
Anyway, we scrambled our way home and ended up at the bus station in New Paltz late at night. The weather had transformed into an all-out blizzard, my father was already in Los Angeles, and there were no taxis to be had. So my Mom did what any enterprising woman with a five-year-old would do: she hailed down a snowplow, and the snowplow drove us the four miles back to our house. It was inspired. How she got to that thought, I’ll never know. As I saw it, riding a snowplow was way more fun than flying to Los Angeles, though I’m sure my Mom was motivated to get home in order to fly out the next day and stab my father, who was already in Los Angeles drinking wine on a patio and watching the sun set.
None of it would have happened if there had been calming, narcotic slot machines in Kennedy Airport, so I guess the moral of the story here is that gambling is good, unless you want to ride a snowplow. Or that family should all suffer together. Or maybe the moral is, don’t try to fly in a snowstorm unless there are slot machines in the airport. Yup, that’s definitely the moral here. Merry Christmas!
