the trip to north carolina, part i: the first encounter with chicago

my sister jennifer moved to north carolina with her husband this past march, much to my dismay. it's not that i don't like her husband. he's darling. it's just that i'm reeeeally attached to my immediate family, and i liked having them all within a half-day's drive of me. i was looking forward to having jennifer and her husband come back for christmas, but then i got the message-- they weren't going to be able to make it out here. so what did i do? i scraped money together and went into a bit of debt to go out there instead. here is part one of the (probably) three-part series about this trip-- the flight out there and my first encounter with the evil entity that is the o'hare airport.



we begin the night before-- christmas day. i packed my suitcase, feeling all responsible, and was getting ready to head to bed early when i realized that i had no idea where my driver's license was. panic mechanism: engage! i tore my apartment apart, flipping things over, dumping things out. finally, in a panic, i called my mother. she talked to me for a bit and asked me some questions. as i was talking to her, i realized that my license was in the little clutch purse i use on special occasions. yes, my mother found my driver's license over the phone. she is magical.

after the license was found, i was still really high-strung and had to repack everything to make sure i wasn't missing anything. i got to bed around 12:30 a.m., which was rather unfortunate because my dad was picking me up at three. except he was early.

at 2:44 a.m., just before my alarm was supposed to go off, my phone rang. i was so disoriented, it's a wonder i managed to answer it at all. also, my body was still tuned in to The Panic Channel, so my reaction was something like this:

yes, that really is what my hair looks like when i wake up.

 i managed to stumble out of bed and pull some clothes on and drag my suitcase down to the street where my dad was waiting. we had a lovely drive to the airport, where i checked in and waited for my plane. for four hours. why for four hours? because 1) i had gotten my plane's take-off time wrong by an hour and 2) my plane was about an hour late taking off. which means that when i landed at the chicago o'hare airport, my hour layover was gone. poof. non-existent.

here is a map of purgatory the freakishly enormous o'hare airport.

point A is where my plane landed. point B is where my connecting flight left from.

yyyyep.

i say the o'hare airport is freakishly huge, and i mean it is freakishly huge. i'm guessing that the distance between point A and point B is about a mile, and i ran it in about ten minutes.  now this may not seem particularly impressive, but i don't think i have actually run a mile since i was probably in the fifth grade. i always just kind of strolled a mile when we had to do it in gym class. it turns out, though, that if i'm faced with a large enough threat, such as not being able to visit my sister, i can move this booty at, dare i say, ludicrous speed.

i feel like this could definitely come in handy during the zombie appocalypse. however, it didn't actually help me catch my plane. by the time i got to the counter, all wobbly-legged and sweaty and pathetic...

my plane had already left.

it turned out that the plane had actually left before my plane had even landed, so i didn't stand a chance.  i did get on another flight a few hours later, though, and eventually found my way to north carolina, where much fun was had. but more on that later.