"We Don't Have Enough Fuel to Make It"

Words you always love to hear coming out of the cockpit when flying into the teeth of a tornado advisory. The past five-day weekend attending Mike & Meg's wedding in South Bend was fantastic, but the last leg of the journey was a colossal nightmare. It's just not normal when the captain is forced to do laps in the air for 40 minutes (I was, quite literally, in a holding patten) and then divert to Albany because we don't have enough fuel to keep stalling while we wait for the weather to clear into LaGuardia.

Which I'm not sure it ever did. The last time I checked, my flight which was supposed to be landing at 5:00pm had still not landed as of 10:20. By that time I had hopped on the Amtrak from Albany to Penn Station and proceeded to catch the MTA North Shore home, finally reaching the finish line some 14 hours after the journey started. I could've just about driven from Chicago to Bristol in the time wasted trying to get there by plane and train. So the lesson of that 1987 John Hughes classic still rings true today: when forced to choose, always go with the automobile.

Anyway, apart from the odyssey of returning to central Connecticut, it was a great weekend and a special time for Mike and Meghan, who are sitting on a beach drinking daiquiris right now while I run from the rainstorms that seem to have taken up a permanent residence in the Northeast. Lucky them. Rest easy on the sands of Oahu this week kids - you earned it.