Chicago

So I left home at 4:45 in the morning yesterday. Took the back roads to the airport. I live 10 miles away from EWR. I parked in the short term parking at terminal C and then checked in at the self check in booth. I stood at the security line and then showed my ID and ticket to the lady there. I was at the wrong terminal. Apparently, Continental- Chicago took off from A and I was in C where most of the other continental flights took off from. So, I ran to the air train and then changed terminals, went through the usual check in procedure, which involves me stripping and being extra checked because of the way I look. I am fine with it. As far as we are consistent with it. The flight took off on time and I was at O’Hare by 8 AM. I took the shuttle from the airport to the McCormick center. Chicago is a beautiful city! It is so different from New York. It is a lot less denser and the water ways through the city gives it a very fairy tale look. It also has a very artsy look to it. I liked it mucho. It was bloody cold though.
I had been to a world radiology show, where all the big guys come and show off their products pertaining to radiology. It is a huge market with many large companies involved. The solutions are expensive and so and so forth. It was fun meeting all these guys and trying to figure out how I could do business with them on a long term and large scale basis. Hopefully, it will happen in time.
I was done by late afternoon and was on my way back to the airport. I took the shuttle again and this was full of the people from the show. I sat next to this very intelligent German gentleman who was going back to Boston. He worked at Harvard and was one of the only 20 people on the planet working on a MRI prototype. The guy gave me some very valuable information. Got to the airport and that’s when the shit hit the fan. I did not realize that a storm was coming the way of Chicago. The airport was packed with people from the show trying to get the hell out of there. There were thousands of people all over the place and it was a zoo. I tried to get myself on stand by for other flights out of there but they were all full. My flight which was scheduled to leave at 7:10 PM got postponed and finally left somewhere after midnight. In the meanwhile, I had lost track of time and hope. Being my pessimistic self, I had a feeling that I would be spending the night at the airport like a refugee and possibly the weekend in some hotel dump around the airport. The gods were smiling and my luck was good. The flight arrived at O Hare from EWR at around 10 and then the people got off. They cleaned the aircraft and then we all ran into the plane. There was this kind of camaraderie on the aircraft as all of us wanted to get out of there real bad. We were helpful, nice and behaving like family. When adversity strikes, humans have this tendency to stick to each other. By now, the snow had begun to fall. It was belting down on the run way. They iced and deiced the plane time and again and we were all revved up to go. Then, for some reason which I have no clue the plane stalled on the run way. There, we were like the child from the good year ad in the middle of nowhere getting belted by the snow and sleet. I looked out of my window and felt this gloom. I was going to spend the night, the weekend and my entire life at the O’Hare airport. We hung out for a while at the runway and for some strange reason again; the plane started strolling towards the take off runway. By the time we left Chicago it was way past midnight and I got home at around 3:30 AM.
I was reading the news and most planes from O’Hare have been cancelled today. I am in good old Jersey where the temperature is 64 degrees unlike freaking Chicago where it was somewhere in the 20s without the wind chill factor.