This evening, I and my brother’s family took a nice trip to La Crosse to get dinner and to visit Walmart- and to delay my trip home a day and a half.

I was supposed to fly back to Albuquerque this evening through Chicago via the La Crosse airport… and, the holidays hit again. Well, really, this time the weather hit.

My plane from La Crosse to Chicago was delayed, due in an hour and some later than its scheduled time, which meant that by the time I got in to Chicago, I would miss my home bound flight. The later flights to Albuquerque were full, and I might be able to get on a flight out of Chicago in the morning- if I flew stand-by. The caveat was that I would need to find somewhere to crash in O’Hare overnight, or sleep at the airport, and queue for the 5AM flight, and see how far stand-by would take me into the day.

“The holidays have most of our flights from O’Hare pretty full the next two days, which means you might end up on stand-by for a day.”

Umm, stand-by? All I could think was “no”.

We asked the airline agent if there were any other routes that might get me closer to home tonight- perhaps a hop in to Denver or Dallas first. “Those flights are all full.”

“What do you have leaving here (La Crosse) for Albuquerque on Sunday”, I asked.

“I can get you on the early flight on Sunday and seat you all the way through to Albuquerque.”

A quick consideration of a night wandering O’Hare airport followed by a long wait for an open seat on an American flight the next morning compared to an early morning booking to fly out of Wisconsin to O’Hare, and then from Chicago to Albuquerque, and the best choice seemed pretty clear.

So we got the tickets changed to Sunday morning flights and I texted my folks to let them know I would be coming home a day and some later, and then we went to Kohl’s to exchange some items from Christmas and then on to dinner at a Chipotle knockoff.

I wasn’t really ready to leave anyways.