When a flightless bird takes to the road

When my flight out of Orlando got delayed, I might have felt sorry for myself if I hadn't been chatting with a woman traveling with three small children: her flight had been delayed several times and she was looking at another three or four hours of waiting in the terminal--and she had run out of diapers for her baby. Sure, I was inconvenienced, but at least I wasn't stuck in an airport with three children and a dearth of diapers.

Remind me never again to try to fly out of Orlando on a Sunday afternoon. My whole area of the terminal was crowded with people whose flights to pretty much everywhere had been delayed, and no was was particularly happy about it. Then my flight got cancelled and the screaming started, one young man loudly encouraging the airline representatives to perform anatomically impossible acts while nearby a bride panicked over the prospect of missing her own wedding. I found a quiet space and checked online for options, most of which required waiting two or three days for an available flight, but if I'm going to be sitting around killing time for two or three days, I'd rather make a little forward progress while I'm doing it. 

So I rented a car and pointed it north.

I probably could have made it a little farther than Charlotte, North Carolina, by Sunday night if I hadn't started out at noon and then stopped for a dinner break at the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge. It was the wrong time of year and the wrong time of day to see many birds, but I saw some great blue herons, great egrets, and white ibises, one green heron, one snowy egret, and a really lovely tricolored heron fishing for dinner. My progress was briefly impeded by an alligator crossing the road, but I soon made my way back to the interstate and headed north.

It was an easy trip, with little traffic and not a drop of rain. I didn't realize that my rental car lacked cruise control until after I was on the road, but somehow I managed to avoid a speeding ticket despite heavy enforcement all along the route. At one rest stop the loudspeaker was blaring Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," but on a long road trip, girls just wanna clean rest room. (Sadly, you can't always get what you want.) And I'm pretty sure the bedsheets at the cheap hotel where I stayed in Charlotte were made of compressed styrofoam, but aside from that, I have no complaints.

I made it to the Columbus airport far more quickly than Frontier was prepared to get me there, and the airline will be footing the bill for my rental car (but not for the gas or one night at a cheap hotel). And then I picked up my own car and made it home without a hitch just 24 hours later than I'd expected, worn out and broke and kind of smelly but relieved to be sitting still. I'm not any happier with the airline than anyone else who was in that terminal yesterday, but at least I didn't have to sit there for two days listening to them scream.

I really love this place, even in the August heat.

Tricolor heron.

Not a speed bump.