Snow Visibility

December was a whirlwind.  Flights to and back from Michigan were horrendous at best.  However, it was worth the hassle to see family.

Due to the ice storm in Dallas/Fort Worth I had to sleep in the airport.  Thankfully there were cots available, but unfortunately because many people had been stuck at the airport for the past 2-3 days.  Over 3,000 people had spent the night before.  The only way for me to get my flights rescheduled after they were cancelled was going to the airport and speaking with the ticket counter.  I tried to call American Airlines to reschedule and it took them 23 hours to respond, which by then was too late.

Then there was an ice storm in Michigan.  In the evenings I would sit in the hot tub with a cold crisp wind blowing on my face.  One of the nights the sky was clear with a bright moon lighting up the snow.  The only clouds were a thin line splitting the sky in half.

Other highlights, beyond spending time with family, were seeing my coworkers and friends, visiting the Henderson castle, seeing the Hobbit The Desolation of Smog, and surprisingly the the Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Flying to Colorado Springs, I ended up on the same flight as a friend from high school.  In Chicago, American Airlines was overbooked and was offering vouchers to take a later flight which we both volunteered.  After volunteering I remembered that a snow storm was headed to Chicago that were already starting to delay flights out of Chicago.  The gate agent booked me on 2 flights to DFW, the first flight had a layover of 0 minutes, the second had a layover of 30 minutes along with a standby flight that gave me 2 hours layover in DFW.  The standby flight had 46 people on the standby list and I was #3.  After attentively waiting 1 seat opened up.  The first person had 3 people in his party so he passed.  The second person's name was called twice with no response.  Score!  Finally a flight in my favor as I took the last seat.

Now that I'm back to Colorado for some skiing, yesterday was sunny with a high of 61F.  Today as planned I headed out to the slopes for a taste of "real" skiing.  Unfortunately this morning the weather started to snow copious amounts of flakes causing terrible travel conditions for us and everyone else in Denver (who were headed to the slopes as well).  We didn't even make it onto I70 the traffic was so horrendous.  So now I write this instead of ski.

Here's to bad weather from ice, snow, and no visibility.