Weather and travel, or thanks for the Super Bowl

We leave tomorrow! I’m glad we aren’t leaving today as the weather is certainly not good for travel. For the out-of-town readers, an artic cold front came thru early this morning, at the same time a low front brought moisture up from the Gulf. As happens in Texas winters, the result was not a lot of snow, but rather ice. The picture on the left shows the light dusting of snow, but under it is ice. You can kinda see the ice in my driveway picture on the right.  All the schools in the region are closed, DFW Airport has only one runway open, even the rail transit system trains are stopped because of the ice, and the roads are almost empty with the only cars seen on the TV news being the ones involved in wrecks.

For those of you who remember Mad Magazine, I say “What, me worry?” I am actually fairly confident that we will make it to the airport tomorrow and our flight will leave on time. And all because the Super Bowl is being played at Jerry World on Sunday. The area has more sand trucks stationed here than it ever thought of having and the officials are going to get the airport open and the roads passable so all those fans can come in and spend their money. How about if I call in that Steelers fans from Dubai need to get to Burleson to go the Babe’s Restaurant, so the South Freeway needs special attention?

Also, we have our ace transport arranged, Senor Mendoza. Ralph assured Phillip that he will get us to the airport tomorrow. I was concerned that I might forget to take our jackets with us, but since the wind chill is near zero, and is expected to stay that way through the next several days, I don’t think I’ll forget our coats. We’re all packed, I’ve cleaned out the refrigerator, my mom is babysitting the plants, Phillip hasn’t added anything to take in the past 12 hours, and my toes look great as I got a pedicure yesterday instead of today.

I contacted the hotel in Quito that will be our final lodging about storing an empty suitcase there. They emailed me back saying that they do have luggage storage and will be happy to keep my suitcase until we check in in March. Excellent! We won’t have to pay the $465 that FedEx quoted us to mail back a box from Quito to Texas. Since the airline allows us two suitcases each (free for international flights) and we are only actually taking one, we’ll take the empty suitcase, actually two – one nested into the other – and bring back full ones. The fourth luggage item during our return will probably be the guitar for our Yankee.

Now, time for the road crews to be impressing Super Bowl officials with their effective clearing of all roadways!