Forty hours in the Atlanta airport. That’s how long my daughter waited there while I was waiting here (see my previous post “Wait! Wait! Wait!”).
After six months working in Laos, the second and longest leg (14 hours) of her flight
home landed in Atlanta the morning the Georgia capital’s Snowpocalypse 2014 began. She became an instant statistic—one of the thousands of travelers stranded later that day in the world’s busiest shut-down airport.
Now You Fly It, Now You Don’t
Tricked into thinking the afternoon flight on which she had been re-booked would actually leave Atlanta, her gullible family back home headed out for the 90-minute drive to the Nashville airport (although we track flights online, air travel time from Atlanta to Nashville is 30 minutes less than our drive to the airport, so we have to leave here before the plane leaves there). Ten minutes into our wait at the Nashville terminal, CANCELLED showed up next to her flight number on the Arriving Flights board. So Anna spent Tuesday night napping in Atlanta’s Concourse C, and we drove home, still with only four of our five daughters.
Not yet savvy about how the cancelled flights game is played, we again fell for the airlines’ this-one-will-make-it ploy on Wednesday afternoon and spent an hour touring parts of the Nashville airport we hadn’t seen before (happily, we discovered a Starbucks outside of the secured area) until CANCELLED showed up again.
Thanks to a network of people following Anna’s saga on facebook, we discovered that a long-time family friend from Atlanta was arriving at the airport from a business trip late Wednesday night. He and Anna found each other, braved the drive through abandoned vehicles along Atlanta’s highways, and Anna spent that night with friends.
As God-timing would have it, my Atlanta-resident niece had planned a business trip from Atlanta to Knoxville the next day (roads were clear by then), so she picked up Anna at the friends’ house. Since the route to Knoxville goes through Chattanooga, we drove there to meet them and bring Anna home. The last leg of her flight never happened. We found out later that even the Thursday afternoon flight she would have been on was cancelled.
Friday required one more roundtrip to Nashville International to retrieve Anna’s luggage which—we found out on Thursday night—had actually made it to Nashville on Wednesday in time for us to pick it up while waiting for Anna, had we known it was there.
The four-day saga of retrieving Anna and her luggage from Snowpocalypse is the first of a series of reasons there have been no updates to Creative Country Living in the past three weeks. The good side of CCL is that we’re real people with real lives (not just statistics), but that’s the bad news, too. Life happens here, and there’s only so much of us to go around. Something has to give. But three weeks?
Anna was just week one.
Daughter Checks In, Son Checks Out
Two days after Anna and her belongings made it home, son Philip arrived from the National Guard base in Alcoa, TN. He’s a statistic, too—one of 80 soldiers from the east Tennessee unit about to deploy to Afghanistan. Here for his last visit home before heading out, we naturally focused most waking hours “soaking him in.” But he cut short his Sunday through Saturday visit by one day to avoid prolonged contact with the stomach virus that took hold of us the Friday of his visit. Fortunately, we had already planned one later chance to see him.
The bug (norovirus—ironically, Nancy is writing about it for the upcoming Beeyoutiful.com nutritional products catalog) ran its course (through us) by end-of-day Monday. That should have left a stretch of two “normal” days before the next scheduled major event—our last chance to see Philip. However, day two (Wednesday 2/12) brought a longed-for snow day on the farm (see my post “Into Each Life a Little Snow Must Fall, Hopefully”), so normal went out the window.
For our big Thursday event, we drove the 200 miles east to Philip’s airbase (he’s a 
helicopter pilot) to join the official family send-off for troops. However, snow there caused a one-day postponement of the event, from Thursday to Friday afternoon. We’d planned an overnight stay anyway, so the change didn’t bother us.
The wondrous pride and mixed emotions of the send-off was bolstered by generous media coverage. Our unusually large family (7 of 8 children present) was an obvious target and garnered an appearance on the local (Knoxville, TN) news (see: http://www.local8now.com/home/headlines/Local-soldiers-spend-last-night-with-families-before-Saturdays-deployment-245606051.html).
Home by midnight Friday—so Anna could leave Saturday morning for a trip to help a friend in Florida (this time she got to fly over Atlanta). Sunday: Church as usual. And, voila, this week: Normal life again. Ha.
We’ve integrated these happenings into ongoing farm management—complicated by our Jersey cow giving birth and requiring extra attention to prevent mastitis as well as a terminally broken chainsaw which slowed the process of procuring firewood. (The chainsaw problem was handled, though, by a generous parting gift from our deploying son—a brand new Stihl!)
All of the above is why this one blog post will have to suffice as the current Creative Country Living update. Our roller coaster stats of these past three weeks set a new record for us.
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